Martin Brest (1992)

It’s usually easier to say that a film’s too long than to suggest exactly how it might have been shorter.  Scent of a Woman, which is way too long (157 minutes), is an exception:  the director Martin Brest would have done better just to cut the last forty minutes.   Most of the first two hours have concentrated on the developing relationship between retired Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade (Al Pacino) – blind, choleric, more or less alcoholic – and the teenager Charlie Simms (Chris O’Donnell), a scholarship boy at an exclusive New England prep school, who needs to earn some cash to afford his fare back to Oregon for the Christmas holidays and applies to look after Frank during the Thanksgiving weekend to earn $300.  Frank’s niece and her husband and kids, with whom he lives, will be away then.  Just before the weekend starts, Charlie has been called in by his headmaster, the needle-nosed, humourless Mr Trask (James Rebhorn), encouraging him to inform on those responsible for a practical joke which saw Trask humiliated in front of the whole school a day or two before.   Charlie won’t give anything away so Trask applies the pressure.  Each year, he tells Charlie, he writes a letter of recommendation for a boy who’s bright but not from a rich family – a letter which virtually guarantees that boy a place at Harvard.  This year Trask has drafted but not yet sent a letter recommending Charlie Simms.  He gives Charlie the weekend to think about it.

In the course of that weekend – which the reprobate Frank decides to spend in New York City with a nervous Charlie in tow – we discover (of course) the bitter misery that underlies Frank Slade’s mordant wisecracking:  how his military career stalled, how he came to lose his sight, how suicidal he feels when he’s not drowning his sorrows.  Scent of a Woman – based on a 1974 Italian film of the same name (Profumo di donna), which was adapted from a story by Giovanni Arpino called Il buio e il miele[1] – is essentially clichéd material, distinguished by some good dialogue from Bo Goldman, an appealing score by Thomas Newman and, especially, Al Pacino’s performance, which it’s fair to describe as irresistible.  I know – I tried to resist it.  Why?  Because Frank Slade is an Academy Award-winning type of character (disabled, joking desperately to combat inner pain, eventually recovering his faith in humanity through a chance encounter).  Pacino duly won the Oscar for playing Frank and duly was the operative word – or, rather, overduly:  this was his eighth nomination and his first win.   (Vittorio Gassman also won prizes, including the Cannes Best Actor award, for his performance in the same role in the Italian forerunner.)

It took a little while for my resistance to break.  In his first scene, Pacino is sitting in a darkened room and his acting is mainly vocal.  The speech rhythms he uses as Frank Slade – which suggest a basso, slightly dangerous W C Fields – take getting used to.  Sally, who’d seen and liked the film before, was laughing from the word go; for a time, I was enjoying her enjoyment as much as Pacino’s playing.   But once you see his face and he starts to move, it’s a different matter.  Pacino, apart from being increasingly funny, does some really brilliant things – especially in the ways he shows Frank’s enduring, not easily thwarted appetite for physical and sensual pleasure.  There are tiny, glinting details like the look in his eyes as he sniffs a bread roll in a restaurant.  There are extended, theatrical highlights, as when he dances the tango with a beautiful young woman (Gabrielle Anwar) – and you see Frank’s body electrified, both by the thrill of the experience and the thrill of being able still to have the experience.

Chris O’Donnell partners Pacino nearly perfectly.  It’s obvious this pleasant and innocuous-looking young man is a limited actor (and no surprise that he’s not gone on to better things in cinema, although he seems still to have regular television work) but he does incredibly well in a difficult role.  The loss of his sight seems to have given Frank Slade super-sensitivity in other departments; nevertheless, because Frank is blind, O’Donnell has to act at some kind of distance from Pacino – virtually solo – and he does so skilfully and expressively.   Scent of a Woman starts going wrong before Frank and Charlie return to New England – in the protracted scene in which Frank is ready to put a bullet through his brain and Charlie has to persuade him not to.   This sequence is a reminder of how much of the pleasure and excitement you feel watching Al Pacino here is about the pleasure and excitement of performance – in other words, you’re compelled by the actor rather than the character he’s playing.  When things get really grim in this scene, there are moments when Pacino is almost diminished but O’Donnell’s playing is tenaciously good.  The star eventually restores the balance of power with a truly great moment.  Charlie begs Frank not to end his life and Frank shouts back:  ‘Life, what life? I don’t have a life’, etc.   These words and the ones that follow are trite but when Pacino yells, ‘I’m in the dark here – don’t you see?  I’m in the dark here!’, he manages, although he’s standing a few inches from O’Donnell, to sound miles away from anyone.  He makes you feel Frank’s desperate isolation.

The misbehaving rich kids at Charlie’s school include, in one of his earliest roles, Philip Seymour Hoffman (credited as Philip S Hoffman) as George Willis, Jr.  Hoffman was twenty-five but, like O’Donnell (who was twenty-two), he’s entirely convincing as a late teenager and, though it’s easy to say this in retrospect, he’s rivetingly witty (and rebarbative):  Hoffman has an impeccable sense of how to come in under the lines of the other kids for maximum impact.  But this film is essentially a two-hander and that’s why its climax is such a debacle.  Trask calls a school assembly to get to the bottom of who played the prank that got him covered in white goo.  Willis and Charlie sit behind (different) tables on the stage – the former accompanied by his father, the latter by Frank, who has made a surprise entrance.   Trask interrogates the boys – he acknowledges the proceedings are as close to a courtroom trial ‘as we can make it’ – and this is largely destructive of the dynamic between Frank and Charlie.

It isn’t even clear what the house rules of this extraordinary set-up are.  At one point, Trask announces his unilateral decision that Charlie has been expelled.  After Frank’s rip-roaring speech in defence of Charlie, the headmaster explains that the discipline committee will meet in closed session:  they go into a five-second huddle before exonerating Charlie.  If Trask is a tyrant shameless enough to make up the school’s justice system as he goes along, it seems unlikely that he’ll be so chastened by the outcome of the meeting that he won’t decide to withdraw the letter of recommendation for Charlie.  At this stage Martin Brest and  Bo Goldman seem to have forgotten – or hope we’ll have forgotten – the specific nature of Charlie’s moral dilemma.  I kept wondering how this would be resolved and couldn’t see how the film-makers could sort things out without copping out – which is what they opt for.  The question of whether it’s worth compromising your principles in exchange for an Ivy League future that your family can’t buy is dispelled in a cloud of abstract moral uplift:  don’t rat on your friends and you’ll come out on top.   But will you get into Harvard?  We’re meant to think that doesn’t matter – that the part Charlie has played in bringing the angrily cynical Frank Slade back to life is reward in itself.  But the young carer deserves more than the $300 he gets for the weekend, considering what Frank puts him through.  The film’s audience, despite Scent of a Woman‘s excessive length, ends up short-changed, too.

26 August 2011

[1] ‘The Dark and the Honey’