Opinion: Maybe Pacino's Not Such a Bad Actor After All

A couple months ago, I came to the conclusion that Al Pacino is the worst actor in the world while watching Heat. Back in February, I saw Dog Day Afternoon for the first time during the West Orange Classic Film Festival at the AMC Loews theater and I changed my mind.

Heat is generally not brought up in a discussion of embarrassing later day Pacino performances. Usually the examples of his shouty showboating are the Devil’s Advocate or Scent of a Woman. He’s terrible in both of those movies, for sure, but he’s just as bad in Heat, a movie that curiously is considered to be very good (Richard Roeper once called it the best movie of all time in an interview with Howard Stern) even though it is surreally, comically bad, mostly thanks to Al Pacino’s performance (also, the plot’s pretty improbable and its strangely ponderous for what’s ostensibly a zippy heist picture). 

In Heat, Pacino’s character is supposed to be a police detective with legendary skills, the sort of skills that would probably require meticulous attention to detail and complete knowledge of investigative techniques. Pacino plays the guy like a hungover uncle who can’t believe he dropped his egg sandwich on his flip flops. And, because they are professional actors and they are obligated to follow the direction of the script, the supporting cops around him respond to him like someone who isn’t a lunatic. It’s almost like a comedy sketch, like something Phil Hartman would have fiercely committed to. Speaking of which, this scene, where Hank Azaria seems to be looking off camera waiting for someone to yell cut, shows how that sketch probably would have gone.

And that’s late period Pacino in a role that’s supposedly good. The “great ass” scene is probably the high watermark of bizarre acting, but it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Every choice he makes in the performance is off-putting and kind of selfish. He pushes away all the other actors and the writers and the director so he can be this screaming weirdo.

So it was jolting watching Dog Day Afternoon and just being floored by Pacino’s acting. It’s like watching a different person. Obviously, there’s a couple decades between the movies, but its weird how much his voice changed. In Dog Day, he speaks in this soft, nasal chime. It’s nervous and charming and sounds like how a real person (well, a real person from the outer boroughs at least) talks. Now, he speaks exclusively from the bottom of his throat, like he’s always trying to do an impression of himself.

One key point of continuity between the two performances I’m comparing.  he even goes big in Dog Day, too. Like the famous scene where he riles up the crowd by yelling “Attica,” he’s framed like a stage actor. You see his whole body in the frame and he plays to the cheap seats.

But the difference between Pacino going big now versus then that it makes sense in terms of his character and the scene in Dog Day Afternoon. His character is a self loathing bipolar loser who’s made nothing but bad choices in his life and has only known bad luck. But he’s propelled by his own sense of delusion and a toxic mix of narcisism and a persecution complex.

He believes he’s exceptional and the crowd reinforces that mistaken belief. He’s energized by the negative attention and plays to it. It’s a feedback loop. He invokes the Attica prison tragedy, which was something that he said earlier in a free associative context, and in the eyes of the crowd, he becomes a tragic, sympathetic figure even though he’s really just a selfish, self deluded sociopath.

But the critical thing here is that you don’t have Al Pacino going big and eating scenery. You have a sloppy mess of a character going big and eating scenery. He’s not an actor; he’s a character.

But as good as the scene is, it's arguably the moment where Pacino lost it. I am very grateful for the folks at the West Orange Classic Film Festival for giving me the chance to see it on the big screen, because Pacino's presence takes up every inch of it.  He carries himself like Freddy Mercury or Mick Jagger—a rock star, someone who commands attention effortlessly and comfortably. And while it's clear that his character is riding this rush of attention and realization of his own innate charisma, it also seems like Pacino, the actor, was feeling the same rush.