Taglines: You get one shot at life. Try not to miss.
A.J. Manglehorn is a reclusive Texas key-maker who spends his days caring for his cat, finding comfort in his work and lamenting a long lost love. Enter kind-hearted bank teller Dawn whose interest in the eccentric Manglehorn may just be able to draw him out of his shell.
Manglehorn is an American drama film directed by David Gordon Green and written by Paul Logan. The film stars Al Pacino, Holly Hunter, Harmony Korine and Chris Messina. It was selected to compete for the Golden Lion at the 71st Venice International Film Festival. The film was released in theaters on June 19, 2015, by IFC Films.
The shooting of the film began on November 4, 2013 in Austin, Texas and the filming lasted for twenty-five days at different locations in the city. The film was scored by Austin post-rock band Explosions in the Sky and David Wingo.
The film premiered in competition at the 71st Venice International Film Festival. It was also screened in the Special Presentations section at the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival. The film was released in theaters on June 19, 2015 by IFC Films.
Film Review for Manglehorn
The Venice film festival clearly believes that nothing succeeds like an excess of Al Pacino. In the course of one hectic 14-hour period, guests took their seats for two new films featuring the 74-year-old actor, a veritable banquet of volcanic brooding and rasping, actorly monologues. The first of these, The Humbling, provided a paunchy, punch-drunk adaptation of the Philip Roth novel. But the second, Manglehorn, showcased the finest performance Pacino has delivered in years.
Directed by the talented David Gordon Green, Manglehorn is a beguiling, minor-key study of the lion in winter, mane gone grey, claws all blunted. Pacino is Angelo Manglehorn, a one-time roustabout who ekes out a living as a locksmith in Texas. Green’s symbolism is neat, if a trifle heavy-handed. Manglehorn has no trouble rescuing a small boy trapped inside the family car, but can’t unlock his own damaged heart. “I got nothing but frustration and disappointment,” he growls, peering out at the town over wire-rim specs.
The film takes this sorry specimen and tosses him outdoors at intervals, where he pays weekly visits to the bank and fleetingly rubs shoulders with a garrulous hustler (played, appropriately enough, by Harmony Korine, erstwhile enfant terrible of American cinema). For the most part, however, Manglehorn is alone in the world, like one of those solitary figures in an Edward Hopper painting. He asks for nothing and is seemingly content to give nothing in return. One senses that even the director is content to keep his distance from Manglehorn. Green allows the character abundant space to breathe and develop, perhaps half-fearing the locksmith might erupt if the film draws too close.
He frames his story with elliptical fadeouts and stylised, slow-motion reveries inside late-night diners or amusement arcades. In the movie’s operatic centrepiece, we watch as Pacino wanders up the highway and past a multiple pile-up of vehicles, a cargo of water melons smashed to a bloody pulp on the road. When Jean-Luc Godard shot a similar scene in his 1967 film Weekend, we were encouraged to view it as a sign of global apocalypse. But Manglehorn doesn’t care; his thoughts are elsewhere. He walks by the horror without missing a beat.
Are we meant to regard him as a noble hermit? Perish the thought. Manglehorn’s isolation turns out to be entirely of his own making. Beneath his thin veneer of charm, the locksmith is grouchy and curdled, a man who lies to himself as much as to those around him. He dotes on his pet cat to avoid showing love to his son, and mourns a bygone romance as a means of safeguarding against any future relationship. Coaxed out on a date by Dawn, the bank teller (Holly Hunter, effective as ever), Manglehorn proceeds to regale her with a lengthy, lachrymose story about the onethat got away, the one woman he will never forget. When Dawn brightly requests that they change the subject, he draws a deep breath and gazes down at his plate. He says: “Whenever I eat beets, they always give me diarrhoea.”
Pacino’s Manglehorn is a subtle master class in neutral shading, with none of the garish flashes that sometimes bedevil his work. The actor’s natural tendency is to hit for the fences and crank up the volume, often magnificently (Dog Day Afternoon), occasionally not (The Scent of a Woman). But Manglehorn provides him with a grand late renaissance, a fresh string to his bow. It takes the splenetic livewire of American film and installs him as condemned human property, boarded up and fenced off. The irony is that, by playing this wreck, Pacino looks as vital and exciting as he did in his pomp.
Manglehorn
Directed by: David Gordon Green
Starring: Al Pacino, Holly Hunter, Harmony Korine, Natalie Wilemon, June Griffin Garcia, Rebecca Franchione, Elizabeth Lestina, Lara Shah, Sierra Scott, Kristin M. Miller
Screenplay by: Paul Logan
Production Design by: Richard A. Wright
Cinematography by: Tim Orr
Film Editing by: Colin Patton
Costume Design by: Jill Newell
Set Decoration by: Jeanette Scott
Music by: Explosions in the Sky, David Wingo
MPAA Rating: PG-13 on appeal for some sexual content and language, and for accident and surgery images.
Studio: IFC Films
Release Date: June 29, 2015
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