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EYE POPPER Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy is a showpiece of post-production work: the matte shots by Leon Harris, Tom Gilleon, Paul Lasaine, David Mattingly, Michelle Moen and Peter Ellenshaw; the musical score by Danny Elfman; the sound editing guided by Dennis Drummond (who gets a justly prominent credit) and the sound editing effects supervised by older brother Patrick Drummond and assisted by Carol Ellison, Dennis Giammarco and Joan Giammarco are all of such high caliber we’re experiencing the combined labor as junk museum artistry. During one sequence of particular accomplishment, Al Pacino’s Big Boy Caprice plans on killing Beatty’s Tracy by rigging a steamy boiler to explode and as the steam builds to its cresendo in the clarity, precision and thrilling rightness of the sound effects, we’re swelling along in the comic book momentum. It’s equal to or surpasses the Sensurround nonsense of Earthquake, the sounds of the locomotive in The Deer Hunter, the horrifying birth prangs of the pods in the second Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the phone ringing in The Right Stuff. The on-set look of Dick Tracy is no less impressive: the popadelic design by Richard Sylbert and art direction by Harold Michelson and set decoration by Rick Simpson; the red, green, blue, yellow, orange and lavender ensemble outfits and Madonna’s breathless gowns by Milena Canonero; those sensationally lit and freshly wet streets; the elaborately applied award-winning cosmetics by John Caglione Jr., Doug Drexler and 17 others. But things start drooping and then go lame—we’re not involved in the story as we are with the externals. Perhaps a couple of reasons for this. One, Beatty decided to cast himself as square Tracy—Jack Nicholson and Robert De Niro were originally offered the role—and the bitchy rumors about his vanity are true: he repeatedly filmed his close-ups to assuage his fears of aging. Not a bad performance, it just doesn’t matter much; having succumbed to movie goddess syndrome, his anxiety takes over and the viewers, even if they only suspect, are feeling acutely aware of a preponderance of self-preoccupation overriding the story. Second, the cast is loaded with way too many clever bits by expert scene stealers: Kathy Bates, James Caan, Seymour Cassel, Charles Durning, Dustin Hoffman, Catherine O’Hara, Estelle Parsons, Mandy Patinkin, Michael J. Pollard, John Schuck, Henry Silva, Paul Sorvino, DickVan Dyke, Madonna’s “don’t you want to frisk me” sultriness and Pacino’s hunchbacked fat-fannied villain, to say nothing about how we can’t keep our eyes off those classic Chester Gould effigies. We’re not complaining, we’re barely able to absorb everything, not with Warren still looking at himself in the mirror. The kid in all of us will forgive what’s insufferably vain from a Hollywood king because he’s made one super-pleasing eye-popper. Estimated cost to make: $47 million; domestic gross $104 million. First feature to be made in digital sound. Text COPYRIGHT © 2005 RALPH BENNER All Rights Reserved.
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