Manglehorn

After trying his hand at mainstream comedies with the likes of Pineapple Express and The Sitter, filmmaker David Gordon Green has recently returned to the land of indies, where he first made his name 15 years ago with Malick-esque surveys such as George Washington. (In between, he’s spent time directing and executive producing episodes of Eastbound & Down.) This new crop of old Green, however, has been marked by a sympathetic eye toward outcasts and failures—guys whose lives didn’t add up to as much as they thought they would. The bumbling dead-enders of Prince Avalanche and the struggling ex-con of Joe—featuring one of Nicolas Cage’s finest performances in too long—may be fools, but Green takes their misery seriously.
Now comes Manglehorn, starring Al Pacino as the titular locksmith with nothing but time on his hands. Manglehorn lives a solitary life—his ailing kitty his only friend—but Green and first-time screenwriter Paul Logan hint at the world he once occupied. Periodically, the film will downshift so that a side character can tell a story about the Manglehorn they used to know: the father, the baseball coach, the loving grandfather. That we see little of the warmth or humanity these characters describe is Manglehorn’s great mystery: Where did that man go?
Like Cage in Joe, Pacino’s appearance in Manglehorn adds extra layers of poignancy and grace to a past-his-prime protagonist. Once one of the most revered actors of his generation, the Oscar-winner has lately stumbled from one misfire to the next. (It’s not that inaccurate to suggest that his most memorable role in the last 10 years was in an Adam Sandler movie.) And so seeing him playing a man humbled by the cruel passage of time feels painfully close to self-critique.
Maybe not surprisingly, then, Manglehorn finds the actor delivering an agreeably modest, empathetic performance. Too many years of hoo-ah overkill have stifled his light touch and effortless charm, replaced with hammy intensity and Scarface parody. But the Pacino on display here mostly puts aside the actor-ly embellishments.