Peter Bradshaw in Venice 

The Humbling: Al Pacino’s bleary Broadway lion explains the gripes of Roth – Venice film festival review

Peter Bradshaw in Venice: It’s the final curtain for Pacino’s ravaged actor in this adaptation of the Philip Roth novel. Might a fling with Greta Gerwig’s gay groupie help ease his ills? How’s about a nice shot of horse tranquilizer?
  
  

Taking a pass on the humble pie ... Al Pacino in The Humbling.
Taking a pass on the humble pie ... Al Pacino in The Humbling. Photograph: Allstar/MILLENNIUM FILMS/Sportsphoto Ltd. Photograph: Allstar/MILLENNIUM FILMS/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar

Broadway theatre is turning into something of a theme at this year’s Venice film festival. Three movies have now featured the Great White Way and the vanity of actors, the anxiety of producers, all the neurosis of professional imposture and pretence. Barry Levinson’s The Humbling is one of these films, and it actually has a couple of almost eerie echoes with Alejandro González Iñárittu’s smash hit opening gala Birdman — especially a scene showing the actor’s worst nightmare: somehow getting locked out of the back of the theatre building just before the show is due to start, having to scramble round to the front under the stunned gaze of the public and persuade the ticket-sellers in the foyer to let you through because you are the star and you need to get on stage. Can there be any bigger nightmare for an ageing celebrity than having to convince non-fans of your importance and argue for your status from scratch?

The Humbling is an adaption by veteran screenwriter Buck Henry of a novel by Philip Roth and though it never quite finds its tonal register as comedy — or satire, or bittersweet anatomy of late-life crisis and May-to-December love — it is entertaining, and its star Al Pacino often finds some very funny, rangy comic riffs. His bleary, bewildered performance is engaging, though you can never quite clear how deliberate his absentness is, or if, like Christopher Walken, he has boiled down a style and manner that will always be there no matter what he is saying and doing. He certainly never looks humbled by anything.

His character is Simon Axler, a renowned theatrical lion who is now suffering from a mixture of stage-fright and existential fear (of the sort that reportedly poleaxed Daniel Day-Lewis and Nicol Williamson) and also a kind of very early-onset dementia. He keeps zoning out in conversations, going into reveries and daymares; he’s not sure of his lines and after a bizarre stage-dive in the middle of As You Like It, Simon fears his gift has deserted him; he bungles a pseudo-Hemingway suicide, chalks up 30 days in rehab and wearily retires from acting to his house in the country where he embarks on a miraculous affair with a younger woman, Pegeen (Greta Gerwig) who does a solid, if unexciting job with this thankless role. Pegeen is the daughter of a family friend; she has always had a crush on Simon and is willing to suspend her gay identity for this liaison; it brings him nothing but humiliation and discontent.

Levinson and Henry conjure a life for Axler which is crowded with bizarre events, furious rows and stalker incursions which Axler finds so bizarre that he looks as if he isn’t sure they are not further psychological symptoms of whatever disorder has ended his career. A delusional woman he has rashly befriended in rehab wants him to kill her husband. Pegeen’s partner Louise (Kyra Sedgwick) shows up, and so does a lover from before that, Prince (Billy Porter), who has had had a sex-change, becoming a man in a desperate bid to get her back, because of her apparent new heterosexuality, a move which earns Prince merely contempt laced with transphobia — which incidentally may be another of those modern sensitivities that Axler’s generation finds alienating.

Pacino shrewdly conveys Axler’s dismayed sense that every time he gets up in the morning he seems to confront something so potentially upsetting and ridiculous he has no option but to retreat further into a haze of Alzheimery blankness and amused bohemian dismissal. There is a genuinely unnerving moment when he is chatting to his housekeeper and then suddenly it is morning and she is breezing in with the day’s groceries — did he sleep for 24 hours? Did he imagine the previous conversation? Pegeen’s parents (Dan Hadaya and Dianne West) are old friends of his and they come round to confront him with his inappropriate behaviour: it leads to a melée in which Pegeen runs over her beloved cat and the group have no option but to suspend hostilities and make a mercy dash to the vet’s where Simon gets a jab of horse-tranquilliser for his back pain and spends the next hour blathering like an incomprehensible idiot. The resulting bizarre dialogue, taking place under cutesy pictures of pets and their owners, is hilarious.

Yet comedy isn’t precisely Pacino’s forte and the movie won’t entirely allow comedy to be the point of Simon Axler’s existence either. We can’t laugh at him — or do anything else at him; we have to remain with him, on his side, to root for this flawed and humorous hero and believe in his essentially un-humbled importance.As a comedy The Humbling gets laughs, as a drama it maintains its narrative hold. But its apparent promise to say something tough but true about mortality, about how our powers must diminish with age — well, that is a truth from which it finally flinches. But not before Al Pacino has strutted and fretted his hour upon the stage perfectly enjoyably.

 

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