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WHATEVER
happened to
Al Pacino? In The Godfather, at the age of
32, he dominated with a glare, a stare and a buttoned
lip. His Michael was the fulcrum upon which the movie
(and the one that followed) pivoted and he made you feel
so much more by showing so much less. It was a coiled,
controlled performance, one of the greatest in American
movies.
But a
few years ago (I date it to 1995’s Heat) he
seemed to change his theory: He got big, and the
pictures got small. Now he’s a blowhard, a
scenery-guzzler, one of those loud and showy guys who
seems to act more with his hair (it looks like a nuclear
explosion in a feather factory) than his eyes. His lip
is so far from buttoned it’s a joke: Loose lips sink
movies.
STRETCHED WAY BEYOND.
In the
preposterous 88 Minutes, the old lion Al Pacino is
surrounded by beautiful younger lionesses, his hair a
suspiciously dark color, his wardrobe too hip for anyone
over 22, his car too quick for his aging reflexes.
In 88
Minutes he plays some kind of playboy-forensic
psychologist-professor who, on the eve of the execution
of the man whom he most famously testified against,
receives a phone message that he has 88 minutes to live.
Thus, in real time, he must find the putative killer and
prevent his own death, even as, in the Seattle that is
the movie’s setting, bodies are being uncovered in crime
scenes that so replicate those of the man Pacino
testified against it suggests that he may have helped
convict the wrong man.
Not
merely Pacino’s overmannered, near-histrionic
performance, but the movie itself could be characterized
as busy, busy, busy. It’s so full of plot twists and
revelations and exploding sports cars that its very
perkiness comes to seem comic. I loved an overwrought
scene where Pacino races through a parking garage waving
his badge and screaming “Halt, I’m a forensic
psychologist for the
FBI!” And if they don’t halt, what’s he going to do?
Psychoanalyze them?
But the
implausibility of it is only one problem, and the
overreliance on cell-phone-delivered plot developments
every six minutes is but one more irritation. There are
so many others. The movie seems to have that
Woody Allen old-guy’s-vanity thing going on: The old
lion is surrounded by beautiful younger lionesses, his
hair a suspiciously dark color, his wardrobe too hip for
anyone over 22, his car too quick for his aging
reflexes. Then there’s the structural deficiency of
having the villain locked up on death row. That fellow,
played by Aryan specimen No. 1 Neal McDonough, can’t get
around and do things, and must therefore exert his will
by proxy. So the plot is left to turn on one of those
bizarre human permutations where a lover of the
condemned man does his bidding and since the bidding is
so energetic (the conceit of the killer is that he
suspends his victims from elaborate pulley systems),
you’re left to wonder if one person could do it all,
much less that fast?
And the
only way the filmmakers can keep McDonough in the movie
is to make him accessible to TV interviewers (on the day
of his execution) which leads to a preposterous
encounter where the shrink and the killer debate each
other on national TV.
I
understand that the genre licenses directors and writers
to stretch a truth for dramatic effect but in this case,
the truth hasn’t been stretched, it’s been
drawn-and-quartered. |
