If I was inclined to be snide about it, I would declare that The Humbling is actually a pretty good way to describe the last decade of Al Pacino’s career. The once-mighty cinematic titan has been on something of a downward slide in recent years, attaching himself to one forgettable film after another. The low point was obviously Jack & Jill, in which he played a burnt out version of himself, rapped about Dunkin Donuts and fell in lust with a shrill, demonic, female Adam Sandler.
So it’s a little ironic that Pacino would take more or less the same route in The Humbling, another film about a has-been actor losing his mind and doing things that would have been unthinkable to him even a few years ago. The Humbling comes from director Barry Levinson (Rain Man) and screenwriter Buck Henry (The Graduate), so on the surface it would appear to be a classy way for Pacino to earn back some of his waning street cred. But although Pacino and his co-star Greta Gerwig contribute some fine performances, there’s a haze of desperation to The Humbling that cannot be ignored. This is Pacino the actor, once again playing an actor not unlike Pacino, in a film that plays like an apology for the last decade of inferior films, and as an uneasy attempt to prove that he’s a good sport about it all.
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Al Pacino stars as a once-mighty actor named Simon Axler, who has a nervous breakdown on stage, retires and becomes near suicidal. He fears that he’s lost his craft, and can’t even moan in pain at the hospital without asking the nurses whether he’s convincing or not. Into his life walks Pegeen (Gerwig), the daughter of a former co-star (Dianne Wiest) who has had a crush on him since childhood. They begin a love affair – of sorts, since the aging Axler can’t quite seem to seal the deal – that turns him into a self-aware old man cliché, desperately clinging to a younger woman and going into bankruptcy to keep her happy.
That’s pretty melancholy, and Levinson plays it that way, but he also plays The Humbling as a silly farce, particularly in an ongoing subplot about a stalker (Nina Arianda) who is trying to convince Axler to kill her pedophile husband. The balance between tragedy and comedy never quite settles in The Humbling, which waffles back and forth between an impressively acted story of an old man aware that he’s losing his marbles but powerless to stop it, and a cringier tale of an old man who feels like the only sane person in a cast of increasingly kooky supporting characters. The film sometimes works as a farce, sometimes as a depressing drama, but by the artificially cynical finale it’s abundantly clear that both tones have failed each other and neither has really emerged victorious.
But what The Humbling does do, if nothing else, is remind us that Al Pacino hasn’t lost his touch, and can indeed pull out a great performance when paired with other talented actors and given something really meaty to chew on. His scenes with Greta Gerwig range from sweet to bitter, often from one second to the other, and achieve genuine sexiness and disconcerting emotional honesty when the material demands it. The actors are an impressive match for each other. If only the jumbled movie they were acting in had held up its end of the bargain.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast and The Blue Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
