© 2024
NPR for Northern Colorado
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

'Manglehorn' Represents The Down Side Of Low-Budget Filmmaking

Ryan Green
/
IFC Films
Pacino as A.J. Manglehorn in David Gordon Green's 'Manglehorn.'

It's an oversimplification, but I get the sense that when British actors begin to age, they turn to American action films to make tons of money. Think Laurence Olivier, Anthony Hopkins, Helen Mirren or Alec Guinness. American actors – Paul Newman, Robert Duvall -- go for less money playing lonely old men in low-budget pictures.

That's what Al Pacino seems to be doing in Manglehorn, where he plays an aging locksmith, estranged from family, without friends, puttering around his shop and eating supper alone at a grim cafeteria.

Like too many films, Manglehorn mistakes misery for depth and understanding.

Aside from about thirty seconds at the end of the picture, Manglehorn serves up an hour and a half of unrelenting misery. The character's name is Manglehorn, but his name is rarely mentioned. His home looks like an abandoned film noir café. It's dark and cluttered, and when he goes outside even in the daytime, the sun feels absent. He walks like a man overburdened.

His son is rich but callous, of course, and the two have little contact. But when they do, Manglehorn is unpleasant and judgmental, while his son is arrogant. Manglehorn also obsesses about a woman he must have loved years ago, but the relationship fizzled – and he laments that. The only slightly bright spots in Manglehorn's life seem to be a nice teller at the bank (Holly Hunter) and his granddaughter, although it's hard to figure out how and why he spends a good bit of time with her, when he and his son seem so out of contact.

Many things in Manglehorn don't add up. Scenes plod on and don't connect well. When the movie fully loses direction, it lurches about with a woo-woo hand-held camera and jumps in time – but turning to empty poetic-ness has never bailed out a movie that's foundering, and it doesn't save the day here, either.

Manglehorn the movie seems to say something to the audience like "Love me because I'm poignant." But it isn't poignant. The film stands closer to incoherent, as if it were written and directed by people who have no idea at all about what either aging or loneliness might mean – or how they might look.

Events don't matter much. Manglehorn once coached little league baseball, and occasionally he visits a high-strung former player who runs arcades and massage parlors and calls him "Coach." He sets Manglehorn up for a massage and out of the blue Manglehorn gets angry, but there's no reason for it, just as there's no reason for Manglehorn's son's animosity. There could be reason, but the film doesn't venture into those territories.

You never get the sense that the characters exist outside of the film. Holly Hunter's bank teller is like an inanimate prop that's there to react and do certain mechanical things with respect to Pacino's Manglehorn. She's not an independent or complex personality that Manglehorn has to come to terms with.

There's one good moment in the picture – a funny bit on how silly banks have become. Manglehorn stops in for coffee and a pathetic doughnut, and going to a branch bank for breakfast or a snack might be as dreary a thing to do as there is. Then a slimy teller tops it off when he calls the customers "guests." It's a lovely, sarcastic 30 seconds of film, and much too little.

This film is basically a very long version of what could be a first sequence for a movie about a lonely man. Some might think that if you can get Al Pacino and make him look dumpy enough, the film's done its work. But even Al Pacino, who is thoroughly good to watch anytime, needs something to work with. You can't just have him mooning about and call it a finished film.

Nobody's that good.

Howie Movshovitz came to Colorado in 1966 as a VISTA Volunteer and never wanted to leave. After three years in VISTA, he went to graduate school at CU-Boulder and got a PhD in English, focusing on the literature of the Middle Ages. In the middle of that process, though (and he still loves that literature) he got sidetracked into movies, made three shorts, started writing film criticism and wound up teaching film at the University of Colorado-Denver. He continues to teach in UCD’s College of Arts & Media.
Related Content