PERSONAL HISTORY REVEALS UNIQUE STYLE

SERIES REACHES A BIT INTO COMIC BOOK STORE OF AMAZEMENTS

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

Creator David Weil dug deep into a personal history to find definition in popular culture with a highly stylized series, Hunter (2020).

Al Pacino stars as Meyer Offerman, a Jewish oligarch hunting Nazi’s directly involved in the Holocaust. The Nazi’s are living in New York after sharing state and scientific secrets with the American government, in the post World War II Cold War era, in exchange for United States citizenship.

The Amazon Prime Original Series is a piece of fiction loosely based on historical and contemporary truths of the Holocaust as well as on the Jewish and Israeli determination to find the perpetrators of the worst genocide in human history.

The United States Government had a program of patriating Nazi’s before the Russians so as to advance the development of Americana in a post world war world.

Pacino’s character is not Simon Wiesenthal though. Judd Hirsch appears briefly in one episode as the biopic Nazi hunter. 

Offerman is Wiesenthal’s comic book doppelganger. 

Weil takes a moment out of his fiction to show the difference between Wiesenthal, using more legal means to bring people such as Adolf Eichmann to trial in Israel, and the composite character Offerman developed by Weil for the 10 part series that premiered on February 21.

Logan Lerman plays Jonah Heidelbaum, the grandson of Holocaust survivors, who must simultaneously discover his heritage and come to terms with the reality of Nazis living in his neighbourhood. 

Weil explores the basis of discrimination and intolerance by drawing comparisons between the Holocaust and race hatred as well as gender stereotypes in the United States, casting several black, and female actors in significant roles.

Weil hires a large, talented cast to compel the narrative through the series, mixing seasoned actors, such as Pacino, Hirsch, Lena Olin, Saul Ribinek, Dylan Baker and Carol Kane with a younger generation, including Lerman, Jerrika Hinton, Josh Radnor and Tiffany Boone.

Directors Nelson McCormick, Michael Uppendahl, Wayne Yip, Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, Dennie Gordon and Millicent Shelton share time behind the camera.

Weir uses a chessboard as a story board to gradually bring the main narrative together: on one side of the table are the hunters and on the other side are the hunted.

The narrative begins with a series of dreamlike episodes in which day to day life in New York City during the 1970s gradually gives way to the surreal life of hunting Nazis. 

The Salvadore Dali like narratives blend the scarred psychology of Holocaust remembrances with the thin veneer of popular culture compelling the collective consciousness during the opulent decade.

Character thoughts flashback to black and white scenes of their time in the concentration camps.

This psychological telling of the life of Holocaust survivors in New York explains why many members of the Jewish communities around the world remain ever vigilant against the remotest possibility of another resurgence of anti-Semitism, whether by post war Nazis or another intolerant group espousing nationalistic goals at the expense of inclusion.

Contemporary pop culture references and cliché ridden dialogue creates a surreal tone, instead of the series’ producers relying on ancient Greek fable, myths and allegory.

Survivors emerging from the horrors of the concentration camps lived every day in a type of fantasy escape mode – not fully comprehending the horror they had survived and not fully accepting they alone remained without most of their family and community.

Weir gradually moves characters and the audience from square to square through fact and fiction, until the narrative becomes real for his characters and the audience. The storyline moves gradually through the narrative device because the truth is too difficult to believe.

The world is represented as too strange and too horrible.

The surrealism gradually gives way to realism as the FBI agent, Millie Morris, played by Jerrika Hinton, becomes more central to the plot. Morris has to overcome racial prejudice, gender barriers and a general disbelief in the compelling storyline of the series. Hinton at times transitions from a supporting character to a leading role in some scenes of the later episodes.

Viewers tuning in to watch Al Pacino go through another character transformation will not be disappointed. Pacino’s kibitzing in a Jewish accent is initially a bit difficult to absorb, but the actor’s body language and hand gestures, as well as facial twitches, ever so gradually suspend disbelief.

Pacino uses all his talents as a cinema artist to convince the audience, as well as his younger costar, Lerman, that he is who he says he is and that he is doing what he is suspected of doing.

Pacino subtly transforms into the leading character in a way that does not create a caricature based on anti-Semetic stereotypes, while around him, a lot of everything else takes comic book form.

Lerman does well co-staring with the iconic Pacino. The casting seems odd at first, but Lerman plays a young character finding purpose apart from the city streets, to Pacino’s older, wiser character who has learned everything a person could learn from the world.

A music score is used to compel scenes, and are sometimes themselves popular cultural references to iconic films.

Weir’s stylized representation of the subject matter might be a bit too surreal – with several awkward attempts at blending humor with horror in almost a comic book form, while some of the characters seem more concerned about smoking dope on the Coney Island boardwalk.

Several scenes contain gory violence and depictions of torture. The opening scenes of episode one set the tone for more than half of the episodes, without actually counting the scenes. The object lessons in sadism do eventually give way to more of a drama as the plot reverses and all truth of the series is revealed in a surprising twist.

The streaming series, though, would likely not be scheduled for prime time television, head to head Sunday night between The Wonderful World of Disney and 60 Minutes.

ONCE IN A WHILE THE ACTOR GIVES THE MOVIE PERFORMANCE OF A LIFETIME

Originally Published December 6, 2019

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

Drug lords and gangsters have sold theatre tickets since the nickelodeon – and in many respects a lead role in such a classic movie made such an impression on the collective consciousness that the actor would be guaranteed cult status.

James Cagney and Jean Harlow played gangsters in the classic Frank Capra film, The Public Enemy (1931). Hollywood would not produce much better to topple the cinema icons until the story of the Italian mafia was put to film by filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola.

Coppola’s Godfather trilogy renewed an interest in gangsters with Italian Americans in suits civilly governing business matters sometimes with the death and the gun violence of the western genre, except in New York City neighborhoods rather than the Nevada Badlands.

Coppola brought together the best and brightest in Hollywood for The Godfather (1972). Iconic actor Marlon Brando was joined by James Caan, Robert Duvall, Talia Shire, Diane Keaton, and newcomer, Al Pacino.

Brando dominated the public’s attention with his performance as the Godfather of New York, Vito Corleone, even though Pacino had more screen time. In the sequel, Godfather II (1974), Pacino took the lead actor role.

The characters portrayed by Brando and Caan had been knocked off in the previous Godfather film, but Coppola again cast Pacino, Duvall, Keaton, and, to a lesser extent, Shire.

Coppola also creates a second narrative to depict an earlier time, adding Robert De Niro and Bruno Kirby to portray the newly immigrated Italians of the 1920s. De Niro plays the young Vito Corleone.

Coppola uses flash backs to this second narrative, while Pacino’s Godfather expands the family’s influence within the mafia from New York City to Las Vegas.

Film fans began to expect lasting entertainment from a Pacino film, demanding expectations that were more often than not met over the next decades of cinema, and then every once in a while, Pacino would put in a performance of a lifetime.

Pacino left Coppola in between Godfather films, finding depth as an actor in such classic New York stories as Serpico (1974) in which Pacino plays a biopic undercover New York City police officer, and And Justice for All (1979) in which Pacino plays an idealistic New York City defense attorney.

New York City had fallen into the gutter during the 1970s with a reputation as being swinging for international celebrities at such places as Studio 54 and unsafe for tourists everywhere else.

Serpico captured the imagination of those people wanting a safer metropolitan center for the world.

Pacino portrays the biopic character as an idealistic Italian American who had wanted to be a police officer all his life only to be confronted with systemic corruption and injustice from day one, in every aspect of the job as a police officer.

Serpico eventually is forced into undercover work where he then becomes entangled in a double blind to expose a system of cash payoffs passing to the bag men for the police division.

In And Justice for All, Pacino portrays an idealistic lawyer representing the innocent and yet indefensible accused in a failing justice system.

In just a few years, and just a handful of motion picture roles later, Pacino had become widely recognized as an accomplished cinematic artist, but the portrayal of a Cuban drug trafficker in the Brian De Palma film, Scarface (1983), branded Pacino into the collective consciousness as an iconic actor.

The modern remake of the Howard Hughes film, Scarface (1932), takes place during the Cuban crime wave in Miami during which the Cuban government released from prisons common criminals mixed in with political prisoners. The mix of convicts were free to flee in boats to Florida from an authoritarian state that restricted travel to and from the island.

Pacino uniquely stylized the lead character with a spitting Cuban accent and body language that sweated criminality so far apart from the Godfather role that audiences went through shock and awe at the performance still years afterward.

As in Serpico, Pacino created a complete character different from any of his previous characters, acting with his eyes, face, voice and body, and transforming himself in every sense of criminality into the Cuban drug trafficker, Tony Montana.

Fans mimicked Pacino’s character Tony Montana in the same way movie goers did James Cagney’s gangster character first screened a half century earlier.

One classic line from the film, “Say hello to my little friend”, became republished over and over again in the hallways of public high schools and around the beer fridge at social gatherings.

Serpico was passive aggressive. But Montana was narcissistic psychotic.

Montana begins as a ‘peasant’ off the boat in Miami, and he quickly moves his way up through the criminal drug trafficking network after doing an established Miami gangster a favour in the Cuban immigrant detention centre.

Michelle Pfeiffer costars as the love interest in the first of several successful film roles opposite leading Hollywood actors, including the portrayal of Catwoman in Batman Returns (1992).

Pacino goes back to the New York cop character in Sea of Love (1989), co-starring Ellen Barkin and John Goodman.

Pacino plays a cop ensnared in a deadly love triangle while carrying out a sting operation. The honest cop narrative intersects with the narrative about the cop that has a lot of personal problems associated with his love interests.

Pacino again is nominated for an Oscar for his portrayal in the star studded film adaptation of the David Mamet Broadway play, Glengarry Glen Ross (1992). Jack Lemon, Alec Baldwin, Alan Arkin and Ed Harris costar as Chicago realtors.

The realtors have slumping sales figures, and as a consequence, they are forced into a performance based system in which only the two highest selling realtors will keep their jobs with the realty company at the end of the month.

Scarface (1983) was locked out at the Academy Awards, but the Oscars eventually fawned all over the talented actor, after seven unsuccessful nominations, for his portrayal of a blind military officer in Scent of a Woman (1992), co-starring Chris O’Donnell and Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Lieutenant Cornel Frank Slade is blind, but Pacino continues to act with his eyes, and develops a complete character finally recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as Oscar worthy.

O’Donnell plays a prep school student hired to take care of the Lt. Cl. so the blind man’s extended family can go out of town for the holidays. Slade has other plans for the weekend, though.

Slade is tired of life; and, he intends to end his tortuous journey in style with a trip from Boston to New York City on Thanksgiving Weekend.

Scent of a Woman is all about character development and Pacino’s acting credentials as a leading Hollywood actor.

The Slade character is again a complete character meticulously created by the talented Pacino.

Pacino goes on after the Oscars in style, playing a workaholic Los Angeles police detective in the Michael Mann film, Heat (1995). Detective Lt. Vincent Hanna dedicates 24/7 of his time to catching a bank robbing crew before another police officer or bank guard is murdered in another heist. Hanna loses another wife, but he keeps his television set and catches the crew of bank robbers.

Pacino is reunited with De Niro. De Niro is cast as the equally fanatical head of the bank robbing crew. The De Niro narrative switches back and forth with the Pacino narrative until the two narratives intersect in the film finale.

Heat is considered a seminal crime drama, earning Michael Mann critical praise, just a few years after his historical drama, The Last of the Mohicans (1992), starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Madeleine Stowe, Wes Studi,

Russell Means, and Eric Schweig. Mann also directed The Insider (1999), Ali (2001), Collateral (2004), Miami Vice (2006) and Public Enemies (2009).

Pacino makes Heat part of his series of films in which he uses honest realism to depict real people. The Hanna character depicts an LA detective trying to survive in the big city as much as catch the thieves.

De Niro also creates a complete character as a professional thief researching all aspects of the job from the ins and outs of particular scores to the strength of metals used in the banks and the measured impact of explosives.

Creating real people on screen is what Pacino does film after film, but not in the way of a character actor. Each Pacino performance is a unique combination of bits and pieces, compelling natural acting and an individuality of character that holds the screen.

All eyes are on Pacino as he works the camera time as efficiently as possible. Audiences are drawn in and consumed by the performances, scene after scene.

Pacino portrays the biopic founder of the Teamsters Union, Jimmy Hoffa, in the Netflix original film, The Irishman (2019), directed by Martin Scorsese, co-starring De Niro and Joe Pesci.

Pacino again creates a realistic image of a legendary figure well known in public circles by almost transposing himself into the biopic character.

Al Pacino, by Lawrence Grobel, New York: Simon Spotlight Al Pacino Entertainment, 2006.