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August 19, 2009
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Al Pacino, Is That You?
It has not been a good spring for Al Pacino, pictured, whose new thriller, 88 Minutes, opened mid-April. The reviews weren't encouraging. They mostly focused on how plodding, implausible and unintentionally funny the film was, but there were plenty of other complaints, too. Among the most memorable was Mahnola Dargis' commentary on Pacino's new look in The New York Times, “a dusky orange tan that suggests a charbroiled George Hamilton and an elevated poof of hair that appears to have been engineered to put Mr. Pacino within vertical range of his female costars.” To be expected were plenty of hoo-ha jokes and complaints about the film's runtime of nearly two hours, which according to most was not only misleading, but nearly two hours too long.
So bad was the film's reception that one particular commentary in the LA Times used it as an opportunity to question the many sketchy film choices that Pacino has made in the past two decades or so. Looking over his recent credits, it's hard not to agree with the Times' assessment that the Pacino we are likely to see in the theaters these days has little, if nothing, in common with the one we so admired in The Godfather and Serpico. In his prime an actor of great energy and nuance, whose performances could occasionally be twitchy and marked by shouting for no good reason, he seems to have fallen back on the twitchiness and shouting, and left the nuance behind. It's more than a little reminiscent of Marlon Brando's last few decades, when his onscreen appearances more often than not had him slouching in a darkened corner, mumbling incoherently over the hem of his muumuu. Pacino has not sunk quite so low yet, but the Phil Spector hair and weird tan do not bode well.
Although the next couple of movies on his slate seem pretty familiar (one's a caper flick about an aging jewel thief and another is a cop drama by the same director as 88 Minutes) as long as he continues to pump out movies on a fairly regular basis, the law of averages dictates there will eventually be a good one in the bunch. He's given us enough that we owe him a few more years, at least, before we write him off completely.
If he buys an island, though, I will start to worry.