Mild spoilers ahead for Scarface and Goodfellas.
I’ve always found Al Pacino’s performance as Tony Montana in Scarface (1983) supremely entertaining and compelling to watch. Some commentators over the years think he’s overreacting in that part, but to me Pacino is magnetic and intense in every scene he’s in. Tony is one of my favourite characters in any film, as boringly blokey as that may sound. I don’t subscribe to his worldview in any way whatsoever; I just find him entertaining to watch. As a person, it is pretty obvious that Tony sucks. Really sucks.
Throughout Scarface it is clearly shown that Tony is a vile human being with very few redeeming qualities. In fact, the whole irony of the movie is that those few redeeming qualities end up getting him bumped off- his moral code of not including women and children in his criminal matters comes back to bite him in a big way. I find it quite confounding that a lot of people- real, actual living, breathing people- actually look up to Tony. This is particularly prevalent in the rap scene, where artists such as Jay Z reference him constantly in his lyrics.
Their admiration of him for his “hustle” and rags-to-riches story is all well and good, but if a normal, well-balanced person were to encounter Tony in real life, they would find him brash, obnoxious, boorish, prickly, ignorant and vain. Basically, universally awful.
Am I, a middle class English person, the best to write about what motivates inner-city American black youths to look up to such aggressively “alpha” role models? Absolutely not! But, I just think Tony’s flaws should be obvious to anyone paying attention. But because he’s so entertaining to watch in the movie, some sane people, of any background, look past it. We are creatures that run on emotion.
The wiser among us would realise this is all in the service of entertaining us, but as I’ve illustrated some people (particularly men) take it a step further. Sooner or later, you start smoking cigars, you carry yourself with a chauvinistic swagger. Then you’ll start making YouTube videos where you boast about your fake lifestyle and call everyone gay.
There is, unfortunately, a lot of overlap in Tony Montana’s approach to life with ideas that you would find nowadays in red-pill toxic masculinity: dick measuring, male dominance, shunning empathy of others, extreme self-reliance, “hustling”, men being the breadwinners. All just utter crap that the likes of pseudo-intellectual dummy Jordan Peterson and massive criminal Andrew Tate would spout.
I suppose the literal image of Tony Montana isn’t problematic: he’s a famous film character like James Bond or Iron Man. But if a man were to hang the Scarface poster in his apartment, or have Tony Montana quotes on his wall, it would be rightly seen as a bit of a red flag to have Tony as your philosophical guide through life.
In essence though, director Brian De Palma’s only crime in all this is making a really good, classic film aided by a scene-stealing performance by Al Pacino. It’s not their problem (or their fault) that people have taken the film’s themes and messages the wrong way, and have chosen to relate to this absolute scumbag. And at least Tony Montana isn’t a real person. Jordan Belfort’s acts of debauchery in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) are entertaining in the context of the movie, but if you were to encounter these guys in real life, if one were to witness it, it would be completely despicable.
The real Jordan Belfort himself has managed to piggy back off the success of the movie through using it to promote his self help seminars. Belfort may claim redemption all he wants, but this is a clearly morally questionable character who has profited off the success of the film. Whether this is Martin Scorcese’s fault or not, in the context of the film, any viewer should be able to separate the fact that Leonardo DiCaprio’s portrayal of Jordan Belfort is entertaining, and not endorse the real life figure.
So why don’t people do that? Why do people still go to Jordan Belfort self help seminars? Why do people still quote Tony Montana as if he is someone to be admired? Do filmmakers have a responsibility to not platform the morally repugnant or maladjusted? Should David Fincher not have made The Social Network (2010), widely regarded as one of the best American films of the past twenty years?
Intellectually, I symphasise with the idea that these people should just go away, and be out of the public eye as much as possible. But the whole point of narrative cinema is studying these individuals and why they are who they are, even if they are world wreckers like Mark Zuckerberg. I could pose the same argument to Luca Guadragino and his upcoming Sam Altman biopic Artificial (2026). It doesn’t look like that film will be a cakewalk for Altman, but should we as society be platforming him in the first place?
Monsters don’t just appear out of thin air. In Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990), there’s an initial romanticisation of the criminal life, but if you pay attention to the movie close enough there is a clear turning point in the middle of the film where the glamour is wiped away, and people start getting whacked.
Hell, even a young Michael Imperlioi gets caught in the crossfire! He’s a young helper for the crew when Joe Pesci shoots him to death for a little backchat. Would you want to be part of a life where you could get shot multiple times in the chest for mildly talking back at someone?
Yet Goodfellas still got a lot of criticism upon release for glorifying the criminal lifestyle.
But if Martin Scorsese made these guys universally and irredeemably awful throughout, for one, it would result in a boring film, but two, it wouldn’t make sense as to why Henry Hill would be attracted to that life in the first place.
If you never show Jordan Belfort having fun at Stratton Oakmont, why would he want to spend his whole life ripping people off and having zero respect for everyone around him? If you never show Mark Zuckerberg believing in the power of Facebook, what would motivate him to try and speed-run the end of the world?
I can love Tony Montana in the context of Scarface and realise that a real life version of him would be trouble for the whole world- I can laugh at Stratton Oakmont’s antics in the Wolf of Wall Street and remember that the movie is still an inditement at their lifestyle- but I worry that people like me are becoming rarer- people that can see that duality of meaning.
Maybe Artificial will turn out to be a great movie and I will love Andrew Garfield’s turn as Sam Altman, but that doesn’t mean I will start loving Sam Altman. But perhaps it will embolden those who think he’s brilliant, which encourages the idea that film and media in general should be giving him as little attention as possible.
At the end of the day, I think it’s a question of cultural education. The last thing I want to do is start censoring the content of films because they might depict immoral and unsavoury people. Hopefully kids under 12 aren’t watching Scarface, as it’s one of the most violent films ever, but there should be more education on the idea that you can enjoy characters like Tony Montana all you like, laugh along with him, but that doesn’t mean you should act like him in real life.
