Movie Review – Hi, Mom!

Hi, Mom! (1970)
Written & Directed by Brian DePalma

We often associate Robert DeNiro with the work of director Martin Scorsese. Some of the actor’s best work has been under the guidance of this filmmaker: Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, Casino, The Irishman. However, DeNiro didn’t make his film debut in Scorsese’s work. Instead, their colleague Brian DePalma first brought the iconic performer to the big screen in 1968 with his dark comedy, Greetings. DeNiro would reprise his role of Jon Rubin, a young aspiring filmmaker. Hi, Mom! is a bitterly angry film about the time in which it was made, so abrasive that it was issued an X rating and had to make one specific cut to drop down to R territory. 

Rubin is a Vietnam vet, a less intense person than Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle, though not by much. He is hired by a film producer (Charles Durning) to make a pornographic film. Rubin has artistic aspirations that aren’t so grand that he won’t turn down money. He’s already been spying on his neighbor, Judy (Jennifer Salt), across the way and begins filming her, the idea being his porno will be voyeuristic. He finds a way to meet her and plots to seduce the woman so he can film them having sex. Inspired by Hitchcock’s Rear Window, De Palma introduces us to the variety of people living in the building across from Rubin, giving peeks into their complicated and often cartoonish private lives. Things don’t go as Rubin planned and eventually devolve into utter chaos.

De Palma has been a directorial chameleon, reinventing himself throughout his career. This early period, until Carrie (1976), was marked by eclectic films. Sometimes he would dip into suspense territory (Sisters, Obsession), but that wasn’t quite his signature yet. After Carrie, though, the director pivoted to bigger budget, suspense-oriented films. That faltered with 1989’s Casualties of War and was compounded by the box office disaster of Bonfire of the Vanities. The rest of the 90s and 2000s would be a mixed bag for De Palma, often not fantastic, though with some highlights (Mission: Impossible). Bonfire is very close to the tone the director was going for in Hi, Mom! They both aspire to be biting critiques of the status quo but get muddled by going in many different directions and not bringing any idea to an interesting conclusion.

Hi, Mom! goes to some intense places that will make a contemporary audience incredibly uncomfortable. There’s a Black theater troupe that includes Rubin’s white photographer neighbor (Gerrit Graham) among their numbers. This subplot leads to an insane final act where Rubin participates in a living theater piece put on by the group. This event runs the bourgeois neighbors through a gauntlet of what is supposed to be staged theater but often feels like real explosions of violence. The white people are put in the position of Black people while the Black performers behave like white people exercising their privilege against the audience. 

There is a moment of sexual assault that the film never clarifies if it was intended to be authentic or a performance. What is clear is that this sequence is meant to play as pure satire with the audience being interviewed afterward, their physical appearances a mess after the performance, exclaiming how eye-opening it all was, and that they want to do it again. The theater troupe is disgusted because this was not the outcome they had hoped, and they become even more militant to get white people to understand their struggle better rather than as some sort of novelty.

The film is a series of sketches, about 10-20 minutes in length, that allows De Palma to vent about the things he saw happening around him. That’s filtered through the director’s evident love of French New Wave cinema, particularly Godard, as well as the surreal satires of Luis Buñuel. Like both these directors, De Palma plays in a world where nothing is literal; everything is exaggerated. The things he is angry about are sadly still very present in contemporary America: hypocritical white liberals, a manipulative media, profound sexual hang-ups, faux feminist hetero men simply trying to get in women’s pants, the insane incestuous amalgam of war & capitalism, a society drenched in systemic racism, and ineffectual political artists who just spout bumper sticker slogans. Blackness becomes a commodity by the end, with white people encouraged to “Be Black, Baby!” which involves them getting out shoe polish and cosplaying. But because they are the educated, professional class, they fail to see how racist this behavior is.

De Palma is walking into territory mainly reserved for people like Richard Pryor, which can be offensive. However, I think films about these topics should offend the sensibilities of those who like to think beyond prejudice. We all have racism in our thought process, embedded there by decades of indoctrination from a culture that values Black people only as much as we can benefit from their existence rather than support them in becoming autonomous equal members of our society. De Palma was clearly sickened by the saccharine way life was examined in popular media and frames many scenes in Hi, Mom! through the lens of the American sitcom, complete with a laugh track and moments of Rubin talking directly to the camera.

This is DeNiro like you have never seen him before, and it’s so interesting to know where he’s headed while the actor is trying to figure out his acting style from scene to scene. He was 27 years old at the time. It’s a shame that in recent years, DeNiro has begun aligning himself with the anti-vaccination movement more and more. Despite his claims that he is not “anti-vax,” he attempted to include the wildly misinformed documentary Vaxxed in his Tribeca Film Festival, only to later remove it after medical community members spoke out. He claimed to be interested in the subject, citing his experience with his autistic son, Eliot, which is infuriating to hear as an autistic person. The link between vaccines and autism is non-existent when you read the “proof” presented by the anti-vax crowd. In 2017, DeNiro took part in a presentation with Robert F. Kennedy about vaccine safety and its links to autism. Ironically, he became a reactionary, the sort his character in this film would have mocked. Live long enough to become the villain, I suppose.