Blu-ray Review: Brian De Palma’s Raising Cain Joins the Shout! Factory

Rather than attempt to stay way ahead of the audience, Brian De Palma’s thrillers are usually one step aside you—the better to lull you into admiring the scenery before guiding you smack into the seedy part of town. With 1992’s Raising Cain, a truly nutzoid psychological mind-fuck in which the experience of trying to pin down where reality stops and dream states begin makes John Lithgow’s crippling schizophrenia look like an attractive alternative, De Palma hands you a map to an entirely different city. Dressed to Kill, in comparison, is his greatest triumph of fastidiousness—a tight, tense, well-oiled calliope of suspense. The 1980 film’s jolts don’t stem from the plot taking unexpected detours, but, rather, grow from one’s slow-dawning realization that De Palma is so talented he can make a film about mistaken and concealed identities without a single shred of doubt over who’s tailing who and you’re still enthralled, grooving on the pleasure of technique.

In contrast, the gauzily astringent Raising Cain recoils from the surfeit of technique, and pleasure takes a holiday. The rickety frame of the story involves Carter Nix (Lithgow), a child psychologist whose father, also a psychologist, used him as a test subject to examine the factors by which a young personality can be formed. Unfortunately, Nix the elder apparently thought it best to focus his research on seeing just how many maladaptations a single brain can hold. Despite a long, annotated case history from the interrogating Dr. Waldheim (Frances Sternhagen) that plays out just long enough to merit one of De Palma’s bravura traveling shots, it’s never clear how many fractured fragments of psyche make up the title character (Cain is Carter’s amoral, almost beatnik alter ego). Accentuating the confusion, De Palma turns the film’s second act into a disorienting labyrinth of dream sequences within flashbacks within fantasies. As Jenny, Carter’s cheating wife, Lolita Davidovich spends at least 10 minutes of the film either waking up in the wrong man’s bed or dying violently, over and over.

Rather than clarifying, De Palma’s technique with Raising Cain effectively obliterates the audience’s bearings. Which gives the film’s final sequence—on the surface a shameless swipe from Dario Argento’s killer reveal at the climax of Tenebre—a nasty twist. De Palma has frequently used dream sequences in his films as a way to demonstrate transference: the bequeathing of erotic terror to Nancy Allen sleeping in Angie Dickenson’s bed in Dressed to Kill or the fear of isolation from peers that Carrie White sanguinely (in every way) teaches Sue Snell in Carrie. But in Raising Cain, there’s no forum for this type of psychological exchange because there isn’t a rational control group. (“There was no body because there was no murder,” as Jennifer Salt would say.)

Raising Cain is, from frame one, a tapestry of dreams; the first shot shows Carter and Jenny’s daughter, Amy (Amanda Pombo), sleeping on the parental surveillance video (in fact, she spends most of the time either sleeping or waiting to sleep). It’s not difficult to accept much of the film as emerging from deep within her abused psyche. Not only does the final (rationally impossible) shot suggest it, but so does the film’s creepiest grace note: the curly haired little boy emerging from a park bathroom to rasp, “I know what you’re going to do. It’s a bad thing, and I’m going to tell,” to Cain, his voice sounding eerily like Lithgow on helium. I know if I were Amy and trying to make sense of why my daddy wanted to put me in a cage, I might start by making one of his personalities in my own age bracket. Ultimately, the reason the final shot is so perversely effective is because of its absence of transference. Instead, it reveals a psyche (or a bunch of them) hopelessly caught in a cycle of insanity.

Image/Sound

We’re getting close to the point where that cold look so many early 1990s films have, especially thrillers, is right in the sweet spot for nostalgia. And so even with a relatively pristine presentation, Raising Cain has a look that feels gauzier than it actually is. And I’m living for it. This is a Bush Sr.-era, badass, corporate thriller with a heart and face of steel, and Shout! Factory’s disc preserves every glint and hard edge. What’s more, the second disc’s director’s cut looks every bit as spectacular. If image is often the downside of films from this particular era, sound typically isn’t. Again, this disc is no exception. In either the stereo or 5.1 surround version, Raising Cain is pretty aggressive, thanks in no small part to another heady-heavy Pino Donaggio score. I might give the 2.0 mix the edge simply for mirroring the claustrophobic nature of the film’s psyche, but that’s only a personal preference.

Extras

This special edition features what might be the coolest bonus feature of the year. In 2012, Dutch De Palma fanatic and former 24LiesASecond contributor Peet Gelderblom “undid” Raising Cain and returned it to its original form. The film was a victim of—or, depending on your point of view, a rising phoenix from—outside interference as the result of tepid test screenings. The theatrical version featured a drastically reordered series of chronological events, and Gelderblom returned to the original script to simulate the way De Palma presumably would’ve preferred the film. (And, in fact, after all was said and done, the director himself endorsed this re-edit.)

In its earlier days, Criterion likened the discs from their imposing collection to film schools in a box; this is one of the increasingly rare bonus features from other labels to actually approach that benchmark. It’s not that the changes are so completely radical to make Raising Cain an entirely new film, but you do get a better sense of De Palma’s impish wit and fondness for red herrings. Viewers will draw their own conclusions as to which version is a “better” film, but having the chance to compare and contrast strengthens the case for the project itself. The edit also comes with an explainer essay and an introduction. Elsewhere are some extensive interviews with five actors from the film, ranging from the loquacious lead John Lithgow to some names much further down the cast list, and also editor Paul Hirsch.

Overall

Brian De Palma’s Raising Cain is, like The Fury, Body Double, and his latest film, Passion, arguably one for the fans. But Shout! Factory’s generous presentation of yet another “alternate reality” for a film already lacking solid bearings makes it impossible to ignore.