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What Al Pacino’s memoirs don’t tell us

The enormous solemnity of his eyes, serious and sober as those of a child, but with a hint of age-old, euphoric irony somewhere inside them. The gangsterish heaviness of his hands, dynastic hands, Godfather hands. The too big head. The sculpted, impassive face that suddenly sags, drags, becomes limp with the weight of life. The voice, New York nasal as a young man, roaring and burning as he grows older, the lungs acting like bellows, the larynx shooting out flames. The timing – the rhythm, the delay, the beating of the void – between stimulus and response. And the energy, Jesus, which is barely in the body Dog Day afternoon energy, as if thirty seconds ago it completely disintegrated into tics and ravings, splinters of itself, and then ten seconds ago – through some act of Looney tunes reversal – it was put back together with a whoosh.

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It’s 1973. Al Pacino and Frank Serpico sit on the deck of a rented seaside house in Montauk, two men staring out at the ocean. Serpico is the whistleblower agent, refusing bribes and kickbacks, whose testimony before the Knapp Commission helped expose systemic corruption within the NYPD. He paid a high price for his righteousness: Isolated and vilified by his fellow officers, he was shot in the face during a suspiciously botched arrest in 1971. Now Pacino is preparing to play him in Sidney’s grimy, funky biopic Lumet. Serpicoand the actor has a question. “Frank,” he says, “why didn’t you take those payouts? Just take that money and give away your share if you didn’t want to keep it? “Al, if I did that,” Serpico replies, “who would I be listening to Beethoven?”

That’s a story of Sunny boyPacino’s new memoir. It’s actually more than a story. It’s a teaching. Who you are when you listen to Beethoven (or Miles Davis, or AC/DC) – isn’t that what every actor, every artist is trying to achieve? It’s the essence. It is your exposed and purely emotional being, and thus your availability to the divine. If you compromise that, you’re screwed. So Pacino plays Serpico as a man with sudden moods and movements, abrupt jokes, shifts in tone, who dons increasingly unlikely costumes – rugged hippie, meatpacker, ultra-Orthodox Jew – as he goes undercover, a trickster whose wild capriciousness connects him somehow to what is vibrant and imperishable in his nature, even while the department, the city, the whole world around him congeals into venality.

Can I say that I have loved Al Pacino for a long time? But until Sunny boyI knew almost nothing about Pacino himself – or rather, I was content to get to know him fleetingly and prismatically, through the appearances of Michael Corleone and Ricky Roma and Tony Montana and Carlito Brigante. Is he ever not Al Pacino, in one of his roles?

Reading Sunny boyyou get the feeling of something restless and almost nameless – until it coheres, white hot, at the moment of dramatic expression. The moment of ignition. “What actors call their instrument,” Pacino writes, “is their whole being: your whole person, your body, your soul. It’s what you play on, it absorbs things and releases them.” He paraphrases his Method teacher Lee Strasberg. “The actor’s instrument,” wrote Strasberg A dream of passion“is itself; he works with the same emotional areas that he uses in real life.”

So real life. Let’s have it. By Sunny boy we learn that Pacino’s material, his toolbox, and his emotional legacy were his childhood in the tenements of the South Bronx: an absent father and a delicate, troubled mother, a wild life on the streets. His teenage years were delinquent. His twenties were a blur of drinking, acting and bohemian insecurity. “If it was late and you heard the sound of someone in your alley with a bombastic voice shouting iambic pentameter into the night, that was probably me.” Bum-hood, or at least a distressed Beatnik-hood, is always reaching out for him, a world of 15-cent beers at dive bars and sitting for hours over a single cup of coffee at the Automat. From drinking alone to reading small editions of Flaubert and Baudelaire on the subway.

The smell of the street lingered on him as he continued on his way, but so did an electric sense of destination. The first wave of Method-associated stars – Brando, Dean, Clift – had muttered and stormed and shrugged and grim-faced across America’s screens. By the time Pacino arrived, full of raw naturalism and second-generation Method-ness, he could thrill people just by entering a room. “I had an anarchic view,” Pacino writes. “Wherever I went, people looked at me as if to say, ‘Where did this guy come from? Who does he think he is?’ An inflamed theater director occasionally shouted, “Method actor!” with him. “It was a taunt, a humiliation.” However, the momentum cannot be stopped. And it’s not just Pacino: everyone is pushing it. In 1967 he sees Dustin Hoffman enter The graduate : “I said, this is it, man, it’s over. He broke the sound barrier.”

Pacino’s own breakthrough role: Michael Corleone in 1972 The godfatherand then, two years later, The Godfather Part II – was a huge challenge. A non-person, almost. At first formless, then extremely dangerous. “Before filming started, I would take long walks through Manhattan, from Ninety-First Street to The Village and back, thinking about how I was going to play him… He’s there and not there at the same time.” So Pacino immediately blanked him out and rolled him up. Cadaver of power and repression. Given to deadly understatement, and with a strange, perfumed gestural economy.

In the role of Sonny Wortzik, the flailing, wired bank robber/accidental hostage taker of Dog Day afternoon(1975), was paradoxically simpler. Here Lumet put him in his element: overheated Brooklyn on the brink of Babylonian collapse, an entire society following the Method, so to speak, setting itself in motion and retriggering. The crowd is excited and unstable; the lumpy cops have no control, over the situation or themselves. Trapped and bulging-eyed, running wildly under the horrible fluorescent lights of the bank interior, Sonny channels it all, sweating through his off-white shirt, waving his dirty handkerchief. He goes out into the street and shouts: “Attica! Attica!” – an improvisation – and a whole series of extras, to name but a few Sunny boygoes “damn crazy.”

Does he harden into caricatures in his later roles? In some of those films (Sea of ​​love, Carlito’s Road), I see him operating on a kind of scorching autopilot. Then there is Smell of a woman . I could watch this movie all day, and sometimes I do. In this the late Pacino manner, the barking and the roaring, transcends itself, because here he plays a man who is in every respect, all barking and roaring, a shell of a man, a hollow booming, cheerfully laughing man: Lt. Col. Frank Slade, a blind man, in despair – “I am HERE in the DARK!” – whose communication style is basically the overpowered Al Pacino.

“The profession of acting,” said Strasberg, “the fundamental art of acting, is something monstrous, because it is done with the same flesh-and-blood muscles with which you perform ordinary actions, real actions.” Sunny boygives us the Pacino of ordinary actions, who potters around and has his experiences, and we see that he is in the service – under the spell – of Pacino the actor. And if there is a certain vagueness or impressionism in his memories, we understand that: he does not want, with too much insight, to violate the precious mystery that is at the heart of his profession. Doesn’t want to compromise who he is when he listens to Beethoven.


This article appears in the November 2024 print edition with the headline ‘Smell of a Man’.


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