5) Scarface
Telling a character’s entire life story over the span of just a couple of hours seems like an exercise of reduction that can minimize the richness of the story itself for the sake of posterior comfort. In other words, I’d rather a storyteller tell me a story in the fullest sense that they wish than for them to be overly concerned with the soreness of my rear end while I’m watching their movie.
Scarface is especially interesting in how it uses its duration because it illustrates a real transformation of the Tony Montana character from a nobody to a kingpin. Breaking Bad was remarkable in showing how an ordinary man could become a drug lord over the course of 62 television episodes; Scarface has only 170 minutes to achieve a similar feat, although Montana isn’t exactly a high school teacher when we first meet him.
I maintain that over the course of the nearly 3 hours of this movie we see young, understated Al Pacino from the 1970s become the loud, boisterous Pacino we know today, and the film has so many memorable and iconic episodes that few would find reason to complain.
