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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
On-screen, he's the archetypal tough guy, womanizer or psycho. But the actor hates guns, drinks only coffee and yearns for a girlfriend.
Dec 3, 2004 | I have been watching Al Pacino movies for days now. Pacino movie after Pacino movie. I'm getting to a stage where I can't tell one from the other. They all involve good guys turned bad or bad guys turned good, or guys constantly wavering on the moral compass so you just can't tell -- cops who kill, killers with fierce codes of conduct. In five movies on the trot he is shot -- "Dog Day Afternoon," "Scarface," "Serpico," "Carlito's Way," "Insomnia." In two of them, he manages to die at the beginning and end. I wake up in the middle of the night and watch another movie, "Heat." He doesn't get killed, but he sees off Robert De Niro. I wake up early and watch another movie, "The Insider." As in "Heat," he wins, but it's a pyrrhic victory. He's destroyed. The final shot shows him walking away -- walking away from life.
I'm beginning to feel like the cop he plays in "Insomnia" who loses his mind through lack of sleep and too much conscience. My pupils are getting bigger and bigger, and less and less discriminating. All I'm seeing is the guns; all I'm hearing is his screaming. His voice seems to get louder and louder in his later films. As Michael Corleone in "The Godfather Part II," the movie that really made him, you could barely hear his voice. Pacino, so young and grave, did the "Method" -- he didn't act so much as inhabit his characters. He expressed himself in the tiniest gestures. He showed ambiguity with consummate economy, saying one thing with his voice and something completely different with his eyes.
In "The Merchant of Venice," which just premiered in London and opens Dec. 29 in the U.S., he plays Shylock, yet another man emptied of hope and defeated by life. His Shylock could be another Carlito or Corleone: a monster, but possibly the most moral man in Shakespeare's Venice; a man who keeps his word, or, as his Tony Montana says in "Scarface": "All I have in this world is my balls, and my word, and I don't break 'em for no one, 'jou understand?"
After quitting the movies in despair for four years in the late 1980s (after the epic flop "Revolution"), Pacino has had an incredibly successful '90s and noughties. People often complain that he is hammy, a parody of his former self, but he is huge box office. In the 1990s he won his first Oscar (after six nominations) for the soppy "Scent of a Woman," and scored huge critical successes with Michael Mann's "Heat," "The Insider" and "Donnie Brascoe." A Channel 4 poll last year named him the No. 1 movie star of all time.
I'm not looking forward to meeting Pacino. I suppose he scares me. The press officer tells me I should have seen the men lining up for "The Merchant of Venice" premiere -- hard nuts with "Scarface" posters who worship Pacino. He says he'd never seen such a crowd. Another press officer brings in a cappuccino for Pacino before he arrives, then replaces it a couple of minutes later because it might have got cold. I am told to prioritize my questions -- Mr. Pacino does not answer in sound bites. Too right. He is famous for mumbling his way through interviews -- talking with tremendous gravitas about the visiting muse and those who need to act as opposed to those who like to act.
He schlumps into the room, almost as broad as he is wide, belly sagging, face weathered but perfectly intact. He is dressed totally in black -- jacket, sweatshirt, trousers, socks, shoes, ring, squiggly pendant round his neck. Al Pacino looks like a gorgeous dosser. He flew into London from L.A. Thursday, and hasn't caught up with his sleep. (Actually, he says he hasn't slept decently since making "Insomnia.") The "Merchant" means a lot to him. Pacino loves his Shakespeare. Having directed the documentary "Looking for Richard" (a lovely, funny film that tries to make sense of Shakespeare and his stage version of "Richard III"), this is his first straight Shakespeare movie.
I ask him if he thinks of Shylock as a hero or a villain. He ums and ahs, and tells me, Well, this guy has suffered such loss and taken so much shit from so many people -- and then he apologizes for being inarticulate. "I get all sluggish when I talk about it." Straight answer, I say -- you've got two seconds, hero or villain.
"Because I see good and bad in all of us, I can't answer that question. I have to say a good-bad man." He'll probably read this quote one day and change his mind, and decide Shylock is a bad-good man. He says he often reads things he has said, and thinks he didn't quite mean that -- it's not that the words have been distorted, it's simply that he didn't quite articulate what he meant.
As he struggles to make up his mind, I ask him about another character -- useless bank robber Sonny Wortzik in "Dog Day Afternoon": hero or villain? He laughs. "You know I'm not going to answer in two seconds. I love the way you say that. What's going to happen to me? Am I going to fall into a pot of water?" Sonny is another villain who stands by his word -- until the police kill him. "He seems like a hero to me." OK, then, what about "Scarface's" Tony Montana, recently voted "biggest movie badass" of all time in Maxim magazine? ("He murders, survives a chainsaw attack, whacks his boss, snorts coke like he's breathing air and kills his best friend," the magazine eulogized.) Pacino thinks. "Well, it depends on what side of the street you are walking on," he says. Two seconds, I say. He grins. "You know I'm going to say 'hero.' Anybody who says 'go shove it' when somebody's got a chain saw that is about to take your head off -- I think pretty much that is a hero in anybody's language."
The new cappuccino arrives. He doesn't drink these days, or take drugs, or smoke. But he does coffee big time. Friends call him Al Cappuccino.
"For you?" the waiter says.
"I believe it is for me," Pacino says.
"Nice to see you," the waiter says.
"Nice to see you," Pacino says. He's incredibly polite. I've stopped feeling scared.
I tell him how depressing I found it watching his movies en masse. He says I'm not the first person to have said that. "Does the pessimism of the films reflect his worldview?" "Wellllll," he says, Pacino style. "In the end you're just playing a role." He says he is just like a cellist or painter, but he is painting pictures or making music with his body.
