Raising Cain

Directed by: Brian De Palma

RS: Not Rated

1992 Thriller

Raising Cain

636 8-6-92
Admirers of writer-director Brian De Palma have reason to get their hopes up about Raising Cain. After the box-office failure of his ambitious Casualties of War and the debacle of his misguided film version of Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities, De Palma is going home to the Hitchcockian scare tactics that made his reputation in such stylish thrillers as Carrie, Dressed to Kill and Blow Out. Modestly budgeted and cast, Raising Cain gives De Palma the chance to bring his sophistication and wit to a genre left bankrupt since his departure for the big-picture extravagances of Scarface and The Untouchables.

Hold off on the cheers. Raising Cain is a mess. It looks like a De Palma movie made by a forger who can barely conceal his contempt for the artist he's copying. John Lithgow (Obsession) stars as Carter, a child psychologist who is on leave from his practice in order to stay home and raise his young daughter, Amy (Amanda Pombo), while his surgeon wife, Jenny (Lolita Davidovich), works. Carter is sweet, attentive and full-tilt nutso.

In the film's opening scene, Carter chloroforms a neighbor, kidnaps her child and stashes the kid in a motel. The mad scheme is to supply babies for his father, a child psychologist who has a clinic in Norway. There's a hitch: Dad's been dead for years. Carter's evil brother, Cain (also played by Lithgow), is another problem, since he's just a manifestation of a multiple-personality disorder brought on by Dad's experiments with young Carter.

When Carter catches his wife having sex with a former lover (Steven Bauer), he really cracks, and the bodies start piling up. So do the movie allusions. Look, there's the car-sinks-in-the-swamp scene from Psycho. And there's the drag-killer-in-the-elevator scene from Dressed to Kill.

De Palma clearly intends all this to be hilarious, with over-the-top performances and slo-mo sequences to cue the audience. The trouble is that the emotions beneath the technique once meant something to him. The De Palma being ridiculed here is the De Palma his sternest critics saw -- shallow, derivative, misogynous and heartless. In Raising Cain, De Palma seems to be buying his own bad press. His film is a sorry and cynical exercise in self-loathing.