This was De Palma\u2019s Godard era, shortly before he pledged allegiance to Alfred Hitchcock. But as is the case with the director\u2019s homages, however explicit, they still feel filtered through his singular sensibility. Despite its blackout sketch structure and improv comedy hijinks, Hi Mom!<\/em> is unmistakably a Brian De Palma picture: endlessly self-reflexive, obsessed with ways of watching and being watched, always implicating the audience in the action with a wicked cackle. It\u2019s basically the same story as Body Double<\/em>, chronicling a young peeping Tom\u2019s pet perversions while playfully reminding us that cinema itself is founded on similar predilections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rubin\u2019s obsession with capturing \u201ca private moment\u201d on camera has followed him home from Vietnam. He talks a cut-rate pornographer (the hilarious Allen Garfield) into financing his dream project. Rubin has rented a crummy tenement across the street from high-rise apartment building, and spends his days pointing a camera into the windows of his neighbors. The first in a career full of nods to Hitchcock\u2019s Rear Window<\/em>, Hi, Mom!<\/em> takes Jimmy Stewart\u2019s nosiness one step further as De Niro attempts to insert himself into the narrative. Rubin comes up with a convoluted means of seducing a single gal across the way (Jennifer Salt) and turning his own residence into a Rube Goldberg camera setup so that he can film himself having sex with her in her apartment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Such an endeavor requires extremely precise timing, with a wrench thrown into the works when she\u2019s hot to trot the moment he walks in. It\u2019s odd that De Niro\u2019s late-career pivot to comedy was greeted as such a surprise given the slapstick shenanigans of these early De Palma pictures. In Hi, Mom!<\/em> he tries on a whole bunch of silly accents, making great hay out of a high-pitched affectation that Rubin seems to think connotes being \u201ccultured.\u201d (For years my friends and I tried to mimic the high dudgeon with which De Niro exclaims, \u201cI\u2019ll be damned!\u201d)<\/p>\n\n\n\n The movie\u2019s most notorious sequence comes when Rubin joins a radical African-American theater troupe, playing a police officer in a production called \u201cBe Black Baby.\u201d The avant-garde performance art piece lures members of the moneyed Manhattan elite downtown, where they\u2019re painted in blackface and horrifically abused by the Black actors \u2013 who are all wearing whiteface makeup and screaming racist slurs. The theatregoers are robbed, beaten and sexually assaulted until a cop (De Niro) interrupts, refusing to believe any of the battered audience members and only listening to the actors wearing whiteface. The sicko punchline to the sequence finds these upper crust liberals all raving about the experience afterwards, discussing how much they\u2019ve learned about oppression and now they really understand how it feels to be Black.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hi, Mom!<\/em> was out of official circulation for many years, and I remember a friend finally tracking down a VHS copy when we were in college. That night, we all stared at the screen in slackjawed awe at \u201cBe Black Baby.\u201d Watching it today, it\u2019s still difficult to believe what you\u2019re watching. The sequence is supposed to be part of a documentary on the film\u2019s PBS parody, National Intellectual Television. (My favorite throwaway gag is that NIT\u2019s sister radio station has a show called \u201cMusic To Write Checks By.\u201d) But somewhere along the line, De Palma abandons the mockumentary gambit and plunges us directly into the dislocation and horror of what\u2019s happening. By the time he pulls back for the punchline, the laughs can\u2019t help but stick in your throat. It\u2019s one of the most audacious things I\u2019ve ever seen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The bitter social satire \u2013 in which wealthy liberals turn being raped and beaten into a hobby that makes them feel better about themselves \u2013 is presumably why De Palma seemed like the perfect director to adapt Tom Wolfe\u2019s The Bonfire of the Vanities<\/em>. Alas, that project was doomed before it even started filming by the sheepish studio\u2019s attempts to make the characters more likable. Such a compromise is of no concern with a run-and-gun independent effort like Hi, Mom!<\/em>, which <\/em>plunges into even chillier depths for its final act, during which Rubin goes undercover with the bourgeoisie and brings his obsession with that high-rise apartment complex to its only logical end. The last time we see Jon Rubin, he\u2019s smiling for the camera.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Hi, Mom!” is streaming on Amazon Prime Video<\/a>, Tubi<\/a>, and Plex<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/hi-mom2-1024x576.jpg\")
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