Jerry Schatzberg (1971)

‘Needle Park’ is the nickname of Sherman Square, where 72^nd Street meets Broadway, among the heroin addicts who congregate there.  The two main characters and the actors playing them are effectively complementary.  Bobby, a small-time drug-dealer and an addict, has the capacity to take the initiative.  Helen, not addicted until she moves in with Bobby, is inert and biddable.  As Bobby, Al Pacino, in his first leading role, is spectacularly volatile.  Kitty Winn’s Helen is a more sluggish though still an arresting presence.  (She won the Best Actress prize at Cannes for this performance, the highlight of a short-lived movie career.)  But the (music-less) film has an unvarying look – glum, brackish – and Jerry Schatzberg, although not unsympathetic towards his characters, reports their caught-in-a-vicious-circle lives without getting inside them.  I was all the more conscious of this seeing The Panic in Needle Park a few weeks after The Wolf of Wall Street and a few days after All That Jazz.  Those two movies might not seem obvious comparators but the rhythm of both resonates with the tempo and trajectory of their protagonist’s life; in Needle Park, the director is at a safe distance.  There are some strong, frightening moments but Bobby and Helen would be like people in a documentary if it weren’t for Pacino’s galvanic acting.

On the rare occasions the tone and rhythm change, Needle Park becomes obvious.  Schatzberg grasps desperately for impact of a more conventional kind – in a sequence illustrating Helen’s brief, inept attempts to be a waitress, or when she turns a trick with a spotty, specky-four-eyes teenage virgin, or in the ephemeral cheerfulness of a scene in which she and Bobby buy a puppy from a breeder in the country.  As they collect the dog, the sun makes what is, I think, its sole appearance in the film.  The weather has reverted to its usual grimness by the time, on the way back to the city, the pup meets his end on the Staten Island ferry.  Left outside the men’s room while Bobby and Helen are shooting up inside, the dog trots off and, before Helen can catch him, disappears over the edge of the ferry.  With Richard Bright, Alan Vint, Raul Julia and Paul Sorvino.  The screenplay by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne is based on a book by James Mills.

12 February 2014