Cain Unable

John Lithgow is an actor who ably steps back and forth between comedy and drama, and who has been powerful at both. I was curious to see him in a role that was perhaps a precursor to his later brilliant work in the fourth season of Dexter -- the 1992 film Raising Cain. But as it turned out, I think if the producers of Dexter had seen Lithgow in this film, they had to really look past the movie's inherent cheesiness to imagine the good he'd bring to their TV series.

I didn't know this until I was watching the opening credits, but Raising Cain was written and directed by Brian De Palma. Having now seen several of his movies, I can definitively say I'm not a fan. In particular, I'm really stunned (in a bad way) at how so very cheap his movies look. Set design, lens choice, use of focus... compare Raising Cain to any other random movie from 1992, and this film feels like a made-for-TV movie in comparison.

That's an especially perplexing result when you consider how truly difficult many of his techniques are. De Palma is a huge fan of "one-ers" -- long camera takes without any cuts. Raising Cain has one nearly five minutes long one-er in the middle of the movie. It travels with the actors down a flight of stairs, through several turns, into an elevator, and out into another room all without interruption. But there seems to be no real narrative reason for this; it's all apparently done just for show, and it just leaves you wishing that the time and effort put into this sequence had been more evenly distributed across the rest of the movie.

John Lithgow is fairly impressive. His character suffers from multiple personality disorder, and in the course of the film, he embodies all of the characters convincingly -- often even playing scenes opposite himself. That said, De Palma does him no favors as either a writer or director. The dialogue is stilted and cliche throughout. And in another example of the film's cheapness, none of the "two Lithgow" scenes is achieved with a split screen visual effect. While you could argue that such a technique allowing the actor to appear twice on screen would have been inappropriate, given that the alter egos exist only in the character's mind, the frenetic cross-cutting that is used feels very amateur.

Essentially, the big draw here is the twist, the mid-film reveal that tells us how Lithgow's character came to develop his split personalities. But there's a lot of movie to sit through for that, and it ultimately doesn't feel worth it. I give Raising Cain a D+.