Brian De Palma makes listening frightening, and John Travolta makes the man doing it worth worrying about. This is a gripping conspiracy thriller, with overcomplicated plotting the chief reservation.
Blow Out makes an unusually persuasive case for paying attention to film sound. Brian De Palma takes the ordinary business of listening, checking and listening again and makes it the centre of a gripping conspiracy thriller. Jack Terry (John Travolta) tries to reconstruct an accident from recorded sound and photographs, giving us a job to follow as well as a danger to anticipate. The pleasure lies in seeing how the evidence is assembled, and the unease begins when we realise how much depends on the person assembling it.
John Travolta makes Jack’s concentration believable. We believe he needs to get this right, and that his involvement will not be easily talked away; his persistence is understandable even when it seems unwise. Nancy Allen, as Sally Badina, supplies a vulnerability that matters when the plotting threatens to turn everyone into a suspect or an obstacle. Her performance gives us a reason to care about someone besides the man investigating.
Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond makes the split-diopter shots useful without disguising their cleverness. Holding near and distant details sharply in view makes us search the frame, conscious that the thing we ought to notice may not be the thing claiming our attention. The deep-focus images give us more information than a succession of close-ups would, while making it harder to decide where to look first. We have to keep checking the background.
Paul Hirsch’s editing is crucial to the reconstruction of the accident. The cuts keep sound and photograph clear enough for us to follow the work, so each comparison carries suspense. We grew anxious watching Jack compare those materials, because each small connection made it harder to dismiss his suspicions. Paul Sylbert’s production design gives that painstaking work a credible setting, though it is the arrangement of sounds and images that holds our attention.
Pino Donaggio’s music is happy to underline the danger, which fits a film this willing to be theatrical. We might sometimes prefer it to leave more room for the recorded sounds, but restraint would hardly be the obvious choice here. John Lithgow, playing Burke, also suits that appetite for excess; his forcefulness keeps the threat from becoming merely an idea discussed by worried people. He makes a useful contrast with John Travolta’s concentration.
The chief reservation is the plot’s fondness for complication. There are stretches where keeping track of the intrigue feels like an interruption to the more absorbing business of examining the evidence. As a conspiracy thriller, it is strongest when it stays with the difficulty of establishing what happened and getting anyone to take that discovery seriously. The political threat gives us good reason to worry, but some of the explanations need untangling.
Watch it somewhere quiet, with the patience to follow Jack’s work. At 108 minutes, Blow Out has room for close attention to sound without becoming a lecture on how films are made. We recommend it with one practical caveat: this is a poor choice for company inclined to talk through the evidence.
