PACINO’S PERFECT POP ACT
He’s got the looks. He's got the charisma. Al Pacino is spot-on as a singer growing old disgracefully. The one snag? He can't sing!
An ageing pop idol no longer firing on all cylinders, Danny Collins (Al Pacino) has a young, faithless fiancee and a sense that life doesn’t amount to all that much. Most of his devoted fans are at least as old as he is, and he needs to wear a truss to stop his satin shirts bursting open. He relies on cocaine to get him through a show, his fans on dentures-friendly packs of liquorice.
Pacino is perfectly cast as Danny, and he knows it. After all, some actors of a certain age are not all that different from their musician counterparts, clinging on a little desperately to a time when they were groovy, back before the word became unfashionable. Pacino knows what it’s like to have a hot, headline-generating former self.
Who does Danny remind us of, with the anodyne signature song, Hey, Baby Doll, that he must keep spewing out to keep his fans happy? Rod Stewart? neil Diamond? Cliff Richard? The surprise is that his character is loosely based on an English folk singer, Steve Tilston, who found out after several decades that John Lennon had once written him a letter.
So, it is with Danny, whose agent (nicely played by Christopher Plummer) produces a 40-year-old letter from Lennon that never found its way to him.
The letter suggested how he should deal with any fame that might come his way and, belatedly, Danny takes the advice to heart.
Fed up with cocaine going up his nose and his artistic integrity going down the pan, he leaves his fiancee to bed her lover in his swanky LA mansion and sets off for suburban new Jersey, where, to the excited disbelief of the staff, he checks into an anonymous Hilton and flirts gently but persistently with the fiftysomething and therefore ‘ ageappropriate’ manageress (Annette Bening).
His reason for crossing the continent, it transpires, is to connect with the son he has never met, Tom (Bobby Cannavale), the product of a brief long-ago relationship with a groupie. Tom, a building contractor, knows the identity of his famous father, but has always despised him from afar.
‘I’ve spent my entire life trying to become the man that you aren’t,’ he tells him, leaving Danny to build bridges with Tom’s more accommodating wife (Jennifer Garner) and daughter. The little girl is called Hope, enabling some none- too - subtle ambiguities. ‘Say goodbye to Hope,’ Danny is told. Yet Hope springs eternal, because it turns out that she has that Hollywood strain of attention- deficit disorder that makes her merely a bit of a chatterbox, but even so, needs the expensive private schooling that Danny is able to fund.
It’s unremittingly corny, but
funny, moving, well observed and very nicely acted, not just by Pacino and the ever watchable Bening, but also by the excellent Cannavale. There’s also, predictably enough, a solid soundtrack of post-Beatles Lennon songs.
i saw this film with my 21-year- old daughter, who loved it and wanted me to give it the full complement of stars.
i would cheerfully anoint it with four, but for two clunking errors of judgment, whether on the part of writer and first-time director Dan fogelman or even Pacino himself, it’s hard to know for sure. one of these is the sudden insertion of a leukaemia storyline, which feels dreadfully forced, a tug on our tear ducts too far (though my daughter dabbed away regardless).
The other is the bewildering decision to have Pacino sing Danny’s songs, rather than have them dubbed. it’s not that he can’t hold a note, but he’ll have you thinking gordon Bennett rather than Tony Bennett.
EYEBroWS might rise, too, at the spectacle of Simon Pegg as a romantic lead in the mostly pleasurable Man Up.
it’s the story of a Bridget Jonesey young woman, nancy (Lake Bell), who despairs of finding a compatible man and then winds up with one by accident, having pinched someone else’s blind date.
THIS
is Jack (Pegg), an online marketing manager in the throes of a painful divorce. He mistakes nancy for another woman, Jessica, whom he’s meant to be meeting under the clock at Waterloo station.
nonetheless, the date unfolds, promisingly. They have a similar sense of humour and both love The Silence of The Lambs. So, nancy lets the misunderstanding develop, answering to the name Jessica at least until an encounter with a creepy former classmate (enjoyably hammed up by rory Kinnear) lets the cat out of the bag.
Jack is aghast at the deceit, but turns out to have a plot of his own, contriving a visit to a wine bar with the intention of passing off his date as his new girlfriend to his waspish soon-to-be exwife (olivia Williams). nancy plays along with the subterfuge, but the burgeoning relationship falters, and she heads off, hours late, for a party at her family home, where her parents (Harriet Walter and Ken Stott) are celebrating their 40th wedding anniversary.
However, in the age- old tradition of rom-coms, Jack realises he has let the perfect mate slip away and wants her back. Unfortunately, he doesn’t know her parents’ address, but the rest you can guess for yourself.
it’s nicely done by director Ben Palmer (look out for a neat visual reference to The Silence of The Lambs), and Tess Morris’s script is full of the kind of relentlessly snappy dialogue that can grate, but here is more amusing than annoying.
Much of that is down to the two principals. i still don’t really buy Pegg as a romantic lead, not even a romantic comedy lead, but he’s an engaging comic actor, and Bell, suppressing her American vowels to deliver an unimpeachably middleclass English accent (another nod to Bridget Jones), is captivating.
Again, three stars seems a bit mean; let’s call both these pictures three and a half.