From street urchin to superstar: the unlikely career of Al Pacino

Ellen Barkin, Al Pacino’s lover-cum-prime- suspect in his comeback movie Sea of Love (1989), once dismissed the artifice of the British acting tradition (by way of an oddly ill-tempered pop at Nigel Havers) by comparing it with the immersive naturalism of the greats of post-war American cinema: Marlon Brando, Meryl Streep, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. It’s a questionable claim, especially given that in Pacino Barkin had perhaps the least naturalistic co-star imaginable.

He is forever searching for the off-beat, the syncopation that will spring the line open

Pacino is – albeit in his own highly idiosyncratic way – no less theatrical an actor than John Gielgud, more invested in the musicality of his line readings than in fidelity to the real. Think of the terrific scene towards the end of Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), when his character, the bouncily coiffed real estate salesman Ricky Roma, is tearing a strip off Kevin Spacey’s hapless office manager John Williamson for speaking out of turn and blowing a deal Roma was on the brink of closing. Pacino’s timing is so anti-intuitive as to demand its own notation:

What you’re hired for /is to help us. Does that seem clear to you? To help us. Not to /fuck us up. To help men who are going out there /to try to earn a living-you-fairy. You company man.

Pacino has often taken flak for pushing these freedoms too far. Viewed another way, the shoutiness and eccentric stress patterns of his performance as, for instance, the blind Vietnam War vet Frank Slade in Scent of a Woman (1992) – alongside his Vincent Hanna in Heat (1995) often considered peak shouty-Al – are not meretricious overacting but an attempt to redeem often quite indifferent material. If a line lacks interest, Pacino will supply it himself. He is for ever searching for the off-beat, the syncopation that will spring the line open and introduce a level of intensity not always present on the page.