INTRODUCING one of Al Pacino’s two films at the Toronto Film Festival, artistic director Cameron Baily remarked that perhaps an “Al Pacino Day” was in order, just as it had been for Bill Murray.
At 74, Pacino debuted his latest work at the festival, films that find him exploring the regrets, ambitions and ruts of old age.
In David Gordon Green’s Manglehorn, he plays a lonely lock-smith, mourning a bygone romance despite the interest of a friendly bank teller (Holly Hunter). In The Humbling, directed by Barry Levinson, Pacino plays an ageing actor no longer interested in performing.
“Ageing seems to have gotten a bit of a bad rap,” Pacino said in an interview. “Like, what do you do now?”
Pacino has been busy in recent years, showing the same curiosity for more elderly characters as he brought to more youthful or middle-aged roles throughout his career.
“We grow in a lot of different ways, and if you listen to your cycles or feel it, that takes you,” Pacino says. “These things I’m doing are expressions of that.“
Manglehorn has earned Pacino rave reviews. Far from the sort of film most septuagenarians would contemplate, it evidences his abiding interest in experimentation. He’s not cementing a legacy, but continuing to stretch.
Green began pondering a film with Pacino after an earlier unrelated meeting. He saw something in him that hadn’t previously been captured in his movies, and asked his friend, Paul Logan, to pen a script for them.
“There was a way he was listening when other people would be talking, and a true intensity in that, and absolutely tuned in,” Green says.
Few actors are better known for their operatic bigness than Pacino. But in Manglehorn, he’s taciturn and hermetic, with hints of Asperger syndrome. And he’s heartbroken: “I got nothing but frustration and disappointment,” he muses in one of his narrated letters to his lost love.
Manglehorn is a kind of surreal fairy tale that stitches together scenes of absurdity to build a beautifully demented grace. Slowly and awkwardly, Pacino’s Angelo Manglehorn opens the locks to himself.
“You see a lot of great Al performance movies that really grab you by the throat and have the bravado and take you to these grand emotional places,” Green says. “I wanted this to be the intimate emotional place.” – Sapa-AP