Hi, Mom!

MGM HOME VIDEO

THIS IS ONE of De Palma's earliest feature films, but his first masterpiece. He had already shown a prodigious command of filmmaking in The Wedding Party and made one of the best films to articulate the social temper of the times (late-60s student rebellion) in the draft-dodger comedy Greetings. But in Hi, Mom! De Palma puts technique and social perception together, sharpening his sophomoric sense of humor.

More than three decades later, it is evident that Hi, Mom!'s self-reflexive visual style and anarchic humor (never before available on DVD) were not a fluke. This movie announced the beginning of a major film sensibility and today it looks smarter and funnier than any current movie that passes for social comedy.

Robert De Niro stars (his third De Palma movie) as a Vietnam vet who becomes obsessed with 16mm filmmaking as a way of making social connections and studying his society. He focuses on a Greenwich Village housing development, evoking the voyeurism of Hitchcock's Rear Window, but it is also parodying the social curiosity of the counterculture movement. Politics become enmeshed with sex when De Niro courts Jennifer Salt (later star of De Palma's Sisters) as a means of gaining access to the apartment building, a symbol of establishment and social conformity.

Each scene has the air of an improvised sketch comedy routine (a looseness that rarely appears in De Palma's later, exquisitely planned and modulated films), but as Hi, Mom! unfolds, the carefully orchestrated political and satirical ideas reveal amazing coherence and urgency. Hi, Mom! proves to be prescient about the uses of media to extend vision into other people's lives and communicate cultural frustration. Although the methods have changed from film to video, the same curiosity and motivation exist. There's also the same potential to deceive public perception; that's the idea behind De Palma's satire of public tv-then called educational television. (Every time Charlie Rose shows the commercial trailer for a movie star, it proves De Palma's prediction about media corruption was right on.)

De Palma's inventiveness is highlighted in a sequence titled "Be Black Baby," where racial tension, media hypocrisy and revolutionary politics collide. No movie or tv sketch since has been as funny or powerful about American social hypocrisy. Its details are too good to give away. To see it is to never forget it. The title, incidentally, refers to the common subversion of FCC rules that most people, excited about their 15 minutes of fame, can't help flouting.