Pacino's way - actor Al Pacino - Column

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), March, 1994 by Christopher Sharrett

One of the trailers for Brian DePalma's film "Carlito's Way" showcases not scenes from the picture, but titles of past movies featuring its star, Al Pacino. As the camera slowly pulls back from a tight close-up of the actor's eyes, viewers read the titles "The Godfather," "Dog Day Afternoon" "Serpico,"," "Scarface," and others, while Pacino's voice reverberates on the soundtrack. Indeed, "Carlito's Way" seems to raise questions not just about old-fashioned star power as a movie's chief box office draw, but about an actor's ability to reinvent himself, and even to become a film's principal author while having little control over screenplay or direction.

Pacino is an extraordinarily gifted artist, but he is also the type of dynamic personality associated at one time with the concept movie star." His dynamism is interwoven with the way he constantly rethinks his screen presence and links it to the articulation of the characters he portrays.

Looking at his films in aggregate, they seem to be about the trials of an ethnic New York street kid and his survival amid the vagaries of a cruel urban civilization. His first starring role, the black-and-white "Panic in Needle Park," set the tone. Shot on location in uptown Manhattan, this grim movie featured Pacino as a beleaguered drug addict bucking the odds against survival. As in much of his early work, it offered a side of Pacino quite different from the one cultivated in the 1980s. Here, he is a small, nasal, unassuming, slightly nerdish character a little intimidated by the world around him. Audiences and some critics tended to confuse Pacino in his early years with Dustin Hoffman, or even to suggest, quite unfairly, that he was a Hoffman ripoff.

In the "Godfather" trilogy, Serpico," and "Dog Day After- noon," which established Pacino's bona fides, he maintained this unassuming quality while cultivating a stronger, self-possessed, yet understated presence that drew on emotional energies associated with the Method. (Pacino, like Robert De Niro, Hoffman, and other actors of his generation, is one of the "sons of Brando.")

In "Dog Day Afternoon," Pacino gave a strong sample of the screen personality to come-a strung-out, over-the-top presence, suggesting an individual whose very being might be termed apocalyptic. ". . . And Justice for All," the tribulations of a New York defense attorney facing a corrupt, even bizarre system, showed Pacino pushing this inner apocalypse in a hyperbolic, caricatured way. In contrast, the much-maligned Cruising," about a cop investigating murders in New York's sadomasochistic gay subculture, saw the actor pulling back a bit, allowing a greater sense of the slow bum associated with his earlier roles. "Cruising" well may be one of Pacino's most representative pictures, depicting a man so internally divided (not least of which about his sexuality), he becomes inarticulate. This formula, after all, is at the basis of the Method's appeal, the sense of a contemporary man so sensitive and tormented he can not express the rage roiling within him.

In Brian Depalma's 1984 remake of Scarface," Pacino completes a transformation. Here, he has become a garrulous, swaggering, explosive figure. To be sure, his depiction of Tony Montano involves an epic statement not only about the American Dream gone awry that is the underpinning of the gangster film, but of the enormous rapaciousness and excess of the 1980s and the internecine violence of those who governed society. This new presence was apparent even in other, lesser vehicles, such as "Sea of Love," yet another hackneyed tale of a cop on the trail of a serial killer.

His Oscar-winning role in "Scent of a Woman" reveals not just the authority of a Hollywood elder statesman, but the culmination of the changes in this protean actor. With his "hoo-hahs," Pacino's character devours the world, without chewing up the scenery. In his bravura turn as a sleazy, fast-on-his-feet real estate salesman in "Glengarry Glen Ross," Pacino's resonant, echoey voice and constantly inflected body language triple his physical stature.

"Carlito's Way" has been criticized for repeating too many of the tropes in Pacino's earlier work and in Depalma's previous movies. Indeed, the premise of a gangster turning over a new leaf in a world too corrupt to accept him looks hoary at a first glance the immediate reference here is the disappointing "Godfather Ill." The real point is that this is a Pacino film, and people go to see it to find out what Pacino is up to as far as thinking about himself and the character he plays.

To be sure, an examination of Pacino's career also shows the weaknesses of suggesting an auteur theory of acting (the actor in charge of himself and his product) since there are so many holes and inconsistencies that belie any attempt to develop a coherent theory of an actor. For all of the successes, there are bizarre failures like "Bobby Deerfield" and "Author, Author!," films that star Pacino for no discemible reason and have little to do with understanding his development.