Review: The Humbling
"All the world's a stage," Simon Axler (Al Pacino) utters in the opening moments of The Humbling. Axler is thirty minutes away from taking the stage in a Broadway production of Shakespeare's As You Like It and he is backstage, dialoguing with his reflection, scrutinising his delivery to adjust any inauthentic notes. Simon is always "on" - he modulates his moans to assess if a nurse believes his pain as he's being wheeled into the hospital, and internally rates the performance of a woman sharing her all too real tale of woe - and when he finds the audience detached during his performance, he throws himself off the stage and lands splat in the orchestra pit.
That act, and the fumbled suicide attempt that follows, lands him thirty days at the Hammerton treatment community, where he confesses to having lost control of his craft, something that's always come naturally to him. What's more, Simon tells his psychiatrist Dr. Farr (Dylan Baker), "I've come to the realisation that I'm having trouble separating a scene from a play with the realities in real life." Simon's not the only one having difficulties with the distinction. One of the other patients, Sybil (Nina Arianda), having seen him kill in so many of his movies, tries to enlist him to do away with her husband, who's been sexually abusing their young daughter. Though Simon demurs, she keeps pressing the matter even stalking him after his stint is over and he's returned to the confines of his Connecticut home, where his things still remain in half-unpacked boxes and crates even though he's been living there for more than a decade.
No sooner is he back home than he's visited by Pegeen (Greta Gerwig), the daughter of a former co-star and lover (Dianne Wiest). He hasn't seen Pegeen since she was ten when he gave her a wedding ring from A Streetcar Named Desire, a gesture that kept her childhood crush on him well aflame into adulthood. Though Pegeen has been gay for the past 16 years, she makes the move on a surprised Simon, who worries about their age difference. "I've been thinking about you inappropriately since it was really inappropriate," she replies, and she is soon entrenched in both his home and his heart.
Though not the brightest or most beautiful, Pegeen has a knack for getting what she wants and leaving a trail of broken hearts in her wake. Former lover Priscilla, now Prince (Billy Porter), comes knocking on Simon's door, looking to reconcile with Pegeen. Then there's Louise Trenner (Kyra Sedgwick), who was seduced by Pegeen into hiring her at a woman's college even though she wasn't the best candidate for the job. Louise harasses Simon with a barrage of calls, cautioning him about Pegeen's wiles: "She's utterly ruthless, utterly coldhearted, incomparably selfish, and completely amoral." Simon refuses to heed all warnings - Pegeen has awakened an appetite within him.
Philip Roth's 30th novel wasn't particularly well-received by critics, most of whom found it a disposable piece of dirty old man fiction. Buck Henry and Michael Zebede, in adapting the novel, have left most of the smuttiness between the pages of Roth's novel. There are acknowledgements of Simon's advanced age impeding their bedroom activities as well as the array of sex toys to which Pegeen avails herself, but the "human playthings" they incorporate into their sex life are relegated to a single imagining.
Director Barry Levinson frames Pacino and Gerwig in such a way that she is always in a position of dominance though Pacino's Simon believes they're enacting their own version of Pygmalion. He dresses her up in more feminine wear, reasoning that she has to dress accordingly to play the part of the woman, but it's clear that Pegeen is very much the one controlling the strings. Gerwig is wonderful here, somehow selling a character that is a fragmentary cipher at best. Is she a lovestruck fan? A scheming seductress? Someone working out her daddy issues? It's never entirely made certain, especially since Simon can't trust what's real or what's imagined.
Pacino delivers his most passionate performance in recent memory, doing away with the latter-day mannerisms that have tipped him into caricature. This is a performance stripped to its essence, and Pacino has never been more alive or affecting.
The Humbling
Directed by: Barry Levinson
Written by: Buck Henry, Michael Zebede; adapted from Philip Roth's novel
Starring: Al Pacino, Greta Gerwig, Charles Grodin, Kyra Sedgwick, Nina Arianda, Dylan Baker, Dianne Wiest, Dan Hedaya, Billy Porter
