Any January or February release is inherently suspect. Moviegoers are typically preoccupied with catching up on awards contenders so it’s a time for studios to offload their lesser fare works seemingly unfit “for your consideration.” There’s even a colloquial term for the block: dump months. While one occasionally finds works of merit deemed too unconventional for the Oscar push — typically documentaries and foreign titles — the double-entendre of the term is often well deserved.
The unconventional titles can veer from brilliant to baffling to bad with Barry Levinson’s thoroughly unconventional The Humbling landing somewhere between the latter two. The film stars Al Pacino as aging actor Simon Axler who following an artistic crisis-cum-mental breakdown and a brief stint in a psychiatric centre returns home to become reacquainted and romantically involved with a younger family friend (Greta Gerwig). Adapted from Philip Roth’s 2011 novel of the same name one would be hard-pressed to mistake the film for any form of high-modernism or abstract experiment though it inadvertently comes close.
Any audience watching The Humbling’s first 10 minutes could be forgiven for thinking they stumbled into an early screen test for Birdman with Pacino in place of Michael Keaton. We watch as he enters into a painfully overwrought dialogue with his reflection before acting out an oddly familiar sequence where locked out of backstage he is forced to work his way back to the stage through incredulous front-of-house ushers.
While Birdman’s vertiginous tendencies were able to maintain a certain level of cohesion as divisive as they may have been The Humbling feels as if it is continually struggling against collapsing in on itself. Levinson took home the best director Oscar in 1989 for Rain Man and remains an established figure (even if each new film feels like a case of diminishing returns) but identifying any control he exerts over The Humbling is a challenge with Pacino seemingly given free rein. Unconvincing as anything more than an especially neurotic version of Al Pacino however he doesn’t so much chew the scenery as slobber all over it.
The film moves quickly with a dizzying frenzy that undercuts any greater sense of narrative arc or even any immediate sense of cinematic space. Ricocheting left to right at times the camera seems tasked with capturing Pacino from all angles as if for the sake of posterity. A more generous viewer might be willing to credit the films elliptical tendencies as an attempt to mirror the mental disconnect of Axler’s character but the argument feels hard-won and the result is unsatisfying.
We are indeed stuck in Axler’s head for most of the film with a series of Skype sessions between Axler and his shrink (Dylan Baker) triggering a number of episodic asides including a tedious subplot concerning a deranged fan bent on involving Axler in her plot to murder her husband. The film seems to operate under the premise that if any plot point concerns Axler its inclusion is valid and its effects cumulative where in reality the film’s asides only hinder an already crippled narrative only capable of progressing in a series of unsatisfying fits and starts.
Gerwig is a talented actress but it is nigh impossible to identify any chemistry between her and Pacino and she seems unable to find solid footing amidst the three-way tango at play between Pacino Levinson and Roth’s text. That she plays a lesbian ostensibly turned straight by Axler’s irresistible allure is just one case of the film’s baffling sense of narrative motivation and progression. Messy and exhausting one’s patience for The Humbling will ultimately depend on their fondness for watching a hammy Pacino or for prototypical Rothian narcissists — although the latter camp might do better to track down last year’s Roth-tinged Listen Up Philip instead.
THE HUMBLING directed by Barry Levinson starring Al Pacino Kyra Sedgwick and Greta Gerwig opens on Friday January 23.
