What Al Pacino's memoirs don't tell us

The great celebration his eyes, serious and sober like a child's, but somewhere in them there is a spark of ancient, euphoric irony. The gangster-like weight of his hands, dynastic hands, Godfather hands. The head is too big. The carved, impassive face that suddenly droops, gives in and sags under the weight of life. The voice, New York nasal as when he was a young man, roaring and burned as he gets older, the lungs work like bellows, the larynx shoots flames. The timing – the beat, the delay, the throbbing of the void – between stimulus and response. And the energy, Jesus, that is barely in the body Dog Day afternoon Energy as if 30 seconds ago he had completely disintegrated into tics and raves, into shards of himself, and then 10 seconds ago – through some act of Looney Tunes Reversal – it was reassembled with a rush.

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The year is 1973. Al Pacino and Frank Serpico are sitting on the patio of a rented oceanfront house in Montauk, two men staring out to sea. Serpico is the whistleblower cop who rejects bribes and kickbacks and whose testimony before the Knapp Commission helped expose systemic corruption in the NYPD. He paid a high price for his honesty: isolated and vilified by his colleagues, he was shot in the face during a suspiciously botched arrest in 1971. Now Pacino is gearing up to play him in Sidney Lumet's dirty, twisted biopic Serpicoand the actor has a question. “Frank,” he says, “why didn’t you take these payouts? Just take the money and give away your share if you don't want to keep it?” “Al, if I did that,” Serpico replies, “who would I be listening to Beethoven?”

This is a story of Sonny BoyPacino's new memoir. Actually, it's more than a story. It's a lesson. 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 therefore your availability to the Divine. If you compromise, you're screwed. So Pacino plays Serpico as a man of sudden moods and movements, abrupt jokes, key changes, shifting through increasingly unlikely costumes – shaggy hippie, meatpacker, ultra-Orthodox Jew – as he goes undercover, a con artist whose wild moodiness somehow connects to what is alive and incorruptible in its nature, even if the department, the city, the entire world around it is frozen in venality.

Can I say that I have loved Al Pacino for a long time? But until Sonny 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 any of his roles?

Read: The many eras of Al Pacino's fame

reading Sonny Boyone has the feeling of something restless and almost nameless – until at the moment of dramatic expression it hangs together in a white-hot manner. The moment of ignition. “What actors call their instrument,” Pacino writes, “is their entire being: your whole person, your body, your soul.” It is what you play on, it takes things in and lets them out.” He paraphrases his methods teacher Lee Strasberg. “The actor’s instrument,” Strasberg wrote A dream full of passion“is himself; He works with the same emotional areas that he uses in real life.”

Real life, that is. Let's have it. Out of Sonny Boy We learn that Pacino's material, his toolkit, his emotional legacy was his childhood in the tenements of the South Bronx: an absent father and a delicate, worried mother, a wild life on the streets. His teenagers were criminals. His 20s were a mix of drinking, acting and bohemian precarity. “If it was late and you heard the sound of someone in your alley shouting iambic pentameters into the night in a bombastic voice, then it was probably me.” Bums, or at least a desperate beatnik hoodie, always reach for him, a world full 15 cent beers in bars and sitting for hours with a single cup of coffee in the machine. Just from drinking and reading tiny copies of Flaubert and Baudelaire on the subway.

The smell of the street clung to him as he set off, but also an electrifying sense of fate clung to him. The first wave of Method-associated stars – Brando, Dean, Clift – had already murmured, stormed, shrugged and grimaced across America's screens. When Pacino arrived, full of raw naturalism and second-generation methodology, he could piss people off just by walking into a room. “I had this anarchic look,” Pacino writes. “No matter where I went, people would look at me like, 'Where is this guy from?' Who does he think he is?' “An outraged theater director regularly shouted: “Method actor!” at him. “It was a mockery, a belittlement.” However, the momentum cannot be stopped. And it's not just Pacino: everyone is pushing. In 1967 he sees Dustin Hoffman The graduate : “I said, that’s 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 big challenge. Almost a non-human. First informal and then extremely dangerous. “Before filming started, I took long walks around Manhattan, from Ninety-First Street to the Village and back, just thinking about how I was going to play him… He's there and not there at the same time.” So Pacino did him at the same time expressionless and shocked. Full of power and oppression. With deadly understatement and a strange, perfumed economy of gestures.

From the June 1972 issue: David Denby's review of The Godfather

Plays Sonny Wortzik, the flailing, wired bank robber and accidental hostage taker of Dog Day afternoon(1975) was paradoxically simpler. Here Lumet put him in his element: overheated Brooklyn on the verge of Babylonian collapse, an entire society that uses the method, so to speak, and triggers itself again and again. The mob is agitated and unstable; The chubby cops have no control, either of the situation or of themselves. Trapped and wide-eyed, Sonny struts wildly under the terrible fluorescent lights inside the bank, channeling everything, sweating through his cream shirt and waving his dirty handkerchief. He goes into the street and shouts: “Attica! Atti-ca!” – an improvisation – and the crowd of extras, to quote it Sonny BoyHe's going “fucking crazy.”

Does he harden into a caricature in his later roles? In some of these films (Sea of ​​love, Carlito's way), I see him operating on some kind of red-hot autopilot. Then there is Scent of a woman . I could watch this movie all day, and sometimes I do. In this, the manner of the late Pacino, the barking and blustering, goes beyond itself, because here he plays a man who is completely in style, all barking and blustering, a shell of a man, a hollowly booming, cheerlessly laughing man: Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade, blind man, desperate – “I'm HERE in the dark!” – whose communication style is basically reminiscent of the hyper Al Pacino.

“The profession of actor,” said Strasberg, “the fundamental art of acting, is a monstrous thing because it is carried out with the same muscles of flesh and blood with which one performs ordinary, real acts.” Sonny Boygives us the Pacino of ordinary actions, of stumbling and experiencing, and we see that he is in the service – under the spell – of Pacino the actor. And if there's a certain fuzziness or impressionism lurking in his memories, we understand: he doesn't want to violate the precious secret that is at the core of his craft with too much insight. Doesn't want to compromise when listening to Beethoven.

This article appears in the November 2024 Print edition with the headline “Scent of a Man”.