The Humbling
DIRECTOR: Barry Levinson
CAST: Al Pacino, Nina Arianda, Dylan Baker, Greta Gerwig, Dianne Wiest, Kyra Sedgwick and Billy Porter
CLASSIFICATION: 13 LS
RUNNING TIME: 113 minutes
RATING: ***
The Humbling started life as Philip Roth’s 30th novel which was dismissed by the critics as little more than the sexual fantasies of an elderly man. And these unfortunate origins probably have a lot to do with the wildly uneven tone and quality of Barry Levinson’s tragi-comedy about the last roar of a once-great stage actor.
Al Pacino runs riot here in the role of the self-absorbed Shakespearean performer. And his love story with a young lesbian who gives up women (“a 16-year-long mistake”) to bed him is nothing short of preposterous.
And yet, once Pacino is surrounded by other characters, the comedy comes thick and fast and the material begins to come together in an absurd sort of way.
One of the themes is the impossibility of separating art and life, and this bizarre potpourri is part Woody Allen sex comedy and part Birdman.
Consider the opening scene, in which the drunken Simon Axler (Pacino) talks to himself in his dressing room mirror as he prepares to go on stage with As You Like It. The camera cross-cuts from Simon to his image as though there were two men dialoguing with each other. Later, he throws himself off the stage, to the audience’s horror. Still later, he locks himself out at the theatre door by mistake and has to argue with the ushers to let him in to his own play.
The “accident” in the theatre, followed by a botched suicide attempt, lands Simon in a posh rehab institute, where he discourses about losing his “craft” in group therapy. There he meets Sybil (Arianda), a spaced-out society woman who describes catching her model husband with his head up their little daughter’s dress. Next, she asks Simon to kill her husband, because he has so much experience with guns in his movies. When, later in the film, she unexpectedly turns up chez lui, she becomes seriously funny.
Simon is dismissed from rehab but stays in close touch with his psychiatrist, Dr Farr (Baker), by Skype. Having moved back into his mansion in Connecticut, Simon is visited by Pegeen (Gerwig), whom he hasn’t seen since she was 10. She may not be smart or beautiful, but Pegeen is good at getting what she wants, like a college teaching job which she secured by sleeping with the dean (Sedgwick). Despite being gay, Pegeen seduces Simon and moves in, much to the chagrin of the love-sick dean and her own ex-girlfriend, Priscilla, who is now known as Prince (Billy Porter) following a sex-change operation.
All these raucous characters and events are filtered through Simon’s unreliable narrator as he continues compulsively reflecting on his feelings for Pegeen. His ageing body is a problem (he’s 65, she’s 33), but not for the resourceful young woman, who simply rolls over in bed and turns on her vibrator.
By this point in the film the laughs are continuous before it shifts back to Broadway and Shakespeare-serious for some final bits of cruelty. – Hollywood Reporter
If you liked St Vincent or Birdman, you will like this.