Manglehorn
Director:
David Gordon Green
Starring: Al
Pacino, Holly Hunter, Harmony Korine
Running time: 97mins
Try as I
might, I can’t put the silliness of the word ‘Manglehorn’ to one side. It sounds
like some exotic and entirely unpleasant genital malady from a comedy sketch featuring
Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. “Sorry, sir, but you have a terrible case of the
Manglehorn and may well require invasive surgery,” Pete – playing a doctor –
would say, while Dud sat looking terrified with a bag of frozen peas in his lap.
But I digress…
Al Pacino has
made some odd career choices in the last few years. There was the cringe-making
TV ad for Sky’s broadband service in which he played golf atop a grand piano
and the bizarre rapping ‘Dunkaccino’ cameo in Adam Sandler’s crime against
cinema Jack and Jill. Manglehorn, however, might just prove to be his strangest
move yet.
Director David
Gordon Green’s film sees Pacino as AJ Manglehorn, an ageing, broken-hearted
locksmith who splits his time between fussing over a pet cat (the unfortunately
named Fanny) and writing innumerable letters to Clara, the love of his life,
who he has somehow managed to drive away many years before. These lengthy and
heartfelt missives always come right back to him, marked ‘return to sender’. He
is an odd and angry man prone to destructive fits of rage and you immediately
suspect it is this that convinced his ex to ditch him. One of the few people he
has any time for is Dawn (Holly Hunter), the teller at the local bank where,
every Friday, he deposits his week’s takings. Despite being Manglehorn’s junior by
a couple of decades, and demonstrably out of his league, Dawn finds herself
attracted to him. Will their path to true love run smooth? Obviously not…
The story is
extremely slight while the film around it ends up being an unconvincing rag-bag
of different styles and ideas. It’s an unconventional romance one minute, a
character study of a man battling depression and the effects of ageing the next,
a symbol-heavy whimsical fantasy at other times. It’s also a homage to Pacino
himself. The bank where Dawn works is a replica of the one in Dog Day
Afternoon, the 1975 Sidney Lumet flick in which the actor played an armed
robber, while Manglehorn’s words to the bank’s security guard – ‘The world is yours’
– directly reference the moment a Goodyear blimp glides ominously over Tony
Montana’s house displaying the exact same message in Scarface. Yes, it’s
indulgent and I’m afraid Marvel has all but exhausted my patience with movies
full of ‘knowing winks’ to other things. But if any actor’s career deserves this
kind of reverential treatment then it’s probably Pacino’s.
Although the
great man’s performance is, for once, quite nuanced (there’s little of the bellowing
and grandstanding we’ve become used to), he’s somewhat let down by the
clumsiness on display elsewhere. Green (an interesting filmmaker with a varied
CV, including stoner-comedy The Pineapple Express and powerful drama Joe) clearly likes his symbolism but ladles
it on rather too thick here.
Manglehorn is a locksmith who can’t ‘unlock’ his
future because he believes a former lover holds the ‘key’ to his happiness. But
he meets a woman called ‘Dawn’ who might be able to offer him a bright, new
start. Manglehorn’s mailbox has a beehive under it to underline how much it
‘stings’ when his letters are returned by Clara. Manglehorn walks past the
scene of a road accident – a number of pulverised watermelons spread all over
the road – to show us the messy, beat-up state of his mind and spirit. By the
time we get to a sequence in which a vet operates on Fanny to remove a key she
has swallowed, you feel like shouting at the screen, “Okay, we get it; Manglehorn
is emotionally and mentally blocked and he needs ‘surgery’ to repair his
damaged psyche.” And don’t even get me started on an irritatingly whimsical
ending so sugary I’m surprised my teeth didn’t all fall out just from being
exposed to it.
Somehow, for
all that, Manglehorn isn’t terrible. Pacino is Pacino – always an eminently watchable
screen presence even when he’s lumbered with a gloomy, uninteresting character
like this one. He’s matched by an equally strong supporting cast, of which the grievously
underrated Holly Hunter is the pick. Their best scene together is one in which
Manglehorn takes Dawn on a date to some astonishingly low-rent diner (the
reasons Clara may have left this total lunkhead stack up higher than Ben Nevis
by this point) and unfavourably compares her to his long-lost love. Instead of
getting angry, Hunter is noticeably wounded as once again her dream of finding
someone is ripped from underneath her. In that moment you realise life has
kicked Dawn hard in the pants just as many times as it has Manglehorn. The
difference is that she hasn’t been throwing her own private pity party about it
for the last umpteen years. She’s a battler and a survivor and therefore
exactly what her would-be companion needs… if only the hopeless old geezer could
see it.
And whilst elements
of the plot are ultimately fairly predictable, one thing I’ll say about Green
is that you literally have no idea what is coming next. Scenes like the
watermelon truck crash and the cat surgery just come out of nowhere – crazy, what-the-fuck
non-sequiturs dumped into the middle of what could have been a simple romcom
about two lonely people getting together in later life. You have to admire his
chutzpah, if little else.
Rating: WW
Manglehorn is in cinemas and on View on Demand now
Ratings
WWWW = Wonderful
WWW = Worthy
WW = Watchable
W = Woeful
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