So yesterday night, I watched Scarface for the second time. The first time I watched this movie was when I was a teenager, and I remember thinking “Oh that’s a great movie, there’s a lot of blood and violence, it’s not boring”.
After watching it, I scrolled on Reddit to see what people were saying about Scarface. Most of the time, they would say “What’s the hype about this movie? I don’t get it. The guy is just an addict who has killed everyone, even his best friend, there’s no story”.
Some would argue that it’s the story of the rise and fall of a drug Lord but I like to see it more about the story of someone who wasn’t able to escape his own demons.
From the beginning of the movie, we can see a man who’s aggressive and cynical. He doesn’t seem to fear the US authorities when he’s questioned about his identity. At this point, Tony Montana seems to fit the cliché of the gangster.
What struck me was his attitude during the deal in the hotel room in which his friend Angel was murdered. Knowing the character, I would expect him to be more aggressive and provocative, but what I could sense here was a bit of hopelessness.
While his friend is being killed, Tony Montana is forced to watch this scene, trying to look away which to me shows that Montana can’t bear to watch someone he loves (or appreciates) get hurt.
Later, he reunites with her sister (Gina) and mother who strongly rejects him. Then, Gina apologizes for their mum’s behavior explaining their mother never recovered from their father leaving. To which Montana replies “Forget Dad. We never had one.”
On the surface, this answer seems dismissive. The kind of line someone says to shut a conversation down. But I think it tells us more about how Tony grew up: without a father, raised by a mother who was poor and grieving, and probably not present emotionally either. Not enough for Tony perhaps.
Throughout the movie, it was clear that Montana was interested in gaining power, and money which can show him as someone greedy and materialistic. But from the previous elements, we can imagine they were ways to distract himself from the inner pain he has.
As Montana started to gain power and money, and even managed to marry Frank’s former trophy wife (Frank who was Tony’s boss), he also starts to consume more and more coke. This shows how sad Montana was deep down and how, all the things he wanted in the first place couldn’t bring him relieve or peace.
After Evina left, Montana showed genuine regrets about treating her badly, regularly asking his men if she called. He could have called and apologized, but it would have been out of his character to do so. Not because he’s a proud man, though he is, but because he was poorly attuned to his emotions, therefore, to his needs. I don’t think he was aware of how sad he was that she left. That’s why I loved it when at some point, he said to one of his men, “If she calls, tell her I love her“. Because we could have thought he was only interested in Elvira because of her beauty and what she incarnated (“The girl of the Big Boss” as she was Frank’s former wife), but in his own way, he loved her. He just never had the tools to tell her directly the proper way.
Killing his best friend was clearly a turning point in Tony’s depression and solitude. From the beginning of the movie, Tony’s anger, and even rage, to me, served to mask his feelings of emptiness and despair. Unable to face his suffering, he tried to cope with money, power, her wife. But only to gradually realize nothing and no one could save him from his misery.
There is no way Tony Montana could have survived at the end of the movie, because inside, he was already dead.
I like to imagine a version where he saves himself. And what gets me is that, in a way, he dies because he tries to free himself.
When Sosa (Tony’s supplier and drug Lord in Bolivia) orders him to kill the journalist threatening to expose him, along with the journalist’s wife and kids in the car, Tony refuses. He knows exactly what that refusal costs him. Sosa will never forgive it. He does it anyway.
This moment is not a moment of redemption, and most of the gangsters have a moral code of not killing women and children. But after a whole film during which Tony Montana tried to escape feeling anything with ambition, drugs, and possessions, this is the one moment he isn’t running. And that, to me, is the moment that matters most.
Because despite everything he’d done and everything that had been done to him, there was still some small parts of him, alive enough to choose values and integrity over more violence, more guilt, and more loss.
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