Al Pacino and Holly Hunter save Manglehorn, an eccentric drama full of symbolism but devoid of substance

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

Reviews: Spy, Danny Collins

Spy

Director: Paul Feig
Starring: Melissa McCarthy, Rose Byrne, Jude Law
Running Time: 120mins

Melissa McCarthy is the most gifted comedy performer in Hollywood right now but, when the competition is Kevin Hart and Adam Sandler, it’s probably damning her with faint praise to say so. Here – in a third collaboration with writer/director Paul Feig following Bridesmaids and The Heat – she plays Susan Cooper, a mild-mannered CIA operative who, from the comfort of her office computer terminal, acts as eyes and ears for Bond-esque secret agent Bradley Fine (Jude Law). But when Fine is taken out of the picture, she steps up to take his place. On the trail of a portable nuclear device for sale to terrorists in Europe, Cooper – employing a variety of cringe-making aliases – butts heads with Rose Byrne’s Bulgarian crime boss Rayna Boyanov, while Jason Statham’s rogue agent Rick Ford keeps popping up to get under her feet and under her skin. 

McCarthy has the ability to elevate mediocre material (Tammy, Identity Thief) but she really shines when armed with a good script and a decent ensemble around her. She gets both here and her chemistry with Statham is particularly enjoyable, the pair swapping insults at 100 miles an hour as they nab many of the best scenes. Statham, star of The Transporter, Crank, and a lot of other movies involving fighting and explosions, plays it absolutely straight as the slow-witted, permanently-furious Ford, his boasts of hardman prowess becoming madder and madder (“I once drove a car off a freeway on top of a train while I was on fire”) and funnier and funnier (“This arm has been ripped off completely… and reattached with this fucking arm”). 

Yes, it’s all over the place and probably 20 minutes too long (the downside of having a big cast and globe-trotting plot), while a big twist towards the end doesn’t quite work; but despite all that Spy is hugely entertaining and, by mainstream Hollywood standards, utterly eccentric. At times it’s like Miranda Hart – playing Cooper’s best pal Nancy – has just wandered in from an episode of her sitcom and, when she teams up with rapper 50 Cent towards the end, the whole thing threatens to turn into some kind of weirdly niche BBC comedy/gangsta rap fan fiction. 

There have been a huge number of spins on the spy genre over the years (everything from Austin Powers and Kingsman: The Secret Service, to Mortdecai, TV's Archer, and the forthcoming Man from U.N.C.L.E reboot) but this is a definite cut above.

Rating: WWW

Danny Collins
Director: Dan Fogelman
Starring: Al Pacino, Annette Bening, Bobby Cannavale
Running time: 106mins

Two things I have a serious aversion to are gloopy sentimentality and John Lennon’s solo oeuvre. Unfortunately, Danny Collins is choc-a-block with both so my enjoyment of it was always going to be limited as a result. And that’s a shame because director Fogelman’s film has its moments. 

Pacino is the titular Collins, a veteran rock star who long ago sold his soul to mammon and now makes a very lucrative living regurgitating his greatest hits on tour. But a personal letter to him from the ex-Beatle – written 40 years ago when Collins was starting out but which never reached him – finally finds its way into the singer’s hands. Lennon’s advice contained in the missive confirms all of Danny’s worst fears: he has betrayed his art and himself, and he decides to cancel his current tour in one last, desperate bid to get back to his song-writing roots. He also tries to reconnect with his long-estranged son, Tom (Cannavale). 

There’s a good deal of winning humour in the film’s first half-hour and this is when it’s at its strongest. Pacino – a perfect mix of natural charm and world-weary ennui – is clearly having a ball and brilliantly bounces off Christopher Plummer (Danny’s manager), Katarina Cas (his young trophy wife), and Annette Bening (the manager of the hotel where he holes up to write new material). However, once Cannavale, his wife (Jennifer Garner) and their cute, ADHD-afflicted young daughter show up, we’re on a one-way trip to Schmaltzville. A revelation just over halfway through about one character’s failing health doesn’t help matters either. 

Music from the late Lennon’s post-Beatles career looms large and is woven in throughout the film. Sometimes it works well, like when Working Class Hero is used ironically to illustrate how absurd Danny’s opulent lifestyle has become, but more often it’s ridiculously on the nose. Collins has a bad day so we get Nobody Told Me, he’s feeling sad about his son so it's time for Beautiful Boy, he’s thinking of what might have been so up pops Imagine. They aren’t great songs in the first place (especially Imagine, the most shamelessly hypocritical ditty ever written) and having them shoehorned in does the film few favours. (In fact, seeing how the movie is based on something that actually happened to Brit folkie Steve Tilston, how come his music wasn’t used?).

Mercifully, Danny Collins finds its feet again in the final third as it refuses to do the predictable thing and serve up a neat and tidy happy ending. A missed opportunity in many respects, then, but a sporadically entertaining one with something to say about second chances and redemption.

Rating: WW

Ratings

WWWW = Wonderful
WWW = Worthwhile
WW = Watchable
W = Woeful