Scent of a Man

The huge solemnity of his eyes, grave and sober as a child’s but with a spark of ancient, euphoric irony back in there somewhere. The gangster-ish heaviness of his hands, dynastic hands, Godfather hands. The too-big head. The carved, impassive face that suddenly droops, drags, goes baggy with the weight of being alive. The voice, New York nasal as a young man, roaring and combusted as he ages, the lungs working like bellows, the larynx shooting flames. The timing—the beat, the lag, the throb of the void—between stimulus and reaction. And the energy, Jesus, that barely-inside-the-body Dog Day Afternoon energy, as if 30 seconds ago he disintegrated utterly into tics and ravings, splinters of self, and then 10 seconds ago—via some act of Looney Tunes reversal—he was whooshingly put back together.

It’s 1973. Al Pacino and Frank Serpico are sitting on the deck of a rented seaside house in Montauk, two men staring at the ocean. Serpico is the whistleblower cop, refuser of bribes and kickbacks, whose testimony before the Knapp Commission helped expose systemic graft in the NYPD. He has paid a high price for his rectitude: Isolated and vilified by his fellow officers, he’d been shot in the face during a suspiciously botched arrest in 1971. Now Pacino is preparing to play him in Sidney Lumet’s grimy, funky biopic Serpico, and the actor has a question. “Frank,” he says, “why didn’t you take those payoffs? Just take that money and give your share away if you didn’t want to keep it?” “Al, if I did that,” Serpico answers, “who would I be when I listen to Beethoven?”

That’s a story from Sonny Boy, Pacino’s new memoir. It’s more than a story, actually. It’s a teaching. Who you are when you listen to Beethoven (or Miles Davis, or AC/DC)—isn’t that what every actor, every artist, is trying to get at? It’s the essence. It’s your exposed and purely emotive being, and with it your availability to the divine. Compromise that, and you’re screwed. So Pacino plays Serpico as a man of sudden moods and movements, abrupt jokes, changes of key, switching through ever more improbable costumes—shaggy hippie, meat-packer, ultra-Orthodox Jew—as he goes undercover, a trickster whose wild whimsicality connects somehow to what is vivid and incorruptible in his nature, even as the department, the city, the whole world congeals in venality around him.

Can I say that I’ve long loved Al Pacino? But until Sonny Boy, I knew almost nothing about Pacino himself—or rather, I was content to know him glancingly and prismatically, via the apparitions of Michael Corleone and Ricky Roma and Tony Montana and Carlito Brigante. Is he ever not Al Pacino, in any of his roles?

[Read: The many eras of Al Pacino’s stardom]

Reading Sonny Boy, you get the feel of something restless and almost nameless—until it coheres, white-hot, at the moment of dramatic expression. The moment of ignition. “What actors call their instrument,” Pacino writes, “is their entire being: your whole person, your body, your soul. It’s what you play on, it absorbs things and lets them out.” He is paraphrasing his Method teacher, Lee Strasberg. “The actor’s instrument,” Strasberg wrote in A Dream of Passion, “is himself; he works with the same emotional areas which he actually uses in real life.”

The real life, then. Let’s have it. From Sonny Boy we learn that Pacino’s material, his toolbox, his emotional inheritance was his childhood in the tenements of the South Bronx: an absent father and a delicate, troubled mother, a wild life on the streets. His teens were delinquent. His 20s were a blur of drinking, acting, and bohemian precarity. “If the hour was late and you heard the sound of someone in your alleyway with a bombastic voice shouting iambic pentameter into the night, that was probably me.” Bum-hood, or at least a distressed Beatnik-hood, is always reaching for him, a world of 15-cent beers in dive bars and sitting for hours over a single cup of coffee in the Automat. Of boozing alone, reading tiny editions of Flaubert and Baudelaire on the subway.

The whiff of the street clung to him as he made his way, but so did an electric sense of destiny. The first wave of Method-associated stars—Brando, Dean, Clift—had already mumbled and stormed and shrugged and grimaced across the screens of America. By the time Pacino arrived, bristling with raw naturalism and second-generation Method-ness, he could wind people up just by entering a room. “I had that anarchic look,” Pacino writes. “No matter where I went, people looked at me as if to say, ‘Where does this guy come from? Who does he think he is?’ ” One inflamed theater director would periodically yell “Method actor!” at him. “It was a taunt, a put-down.” The momentum, though, is unstoppable. And it’s not just Pacino: Everyone’s pushing it. In 1967, he sees Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate : “I said, this is it, man—it’s over. He’s broken the sound barrier.”

Pacino’s own breakout role—Michael Corleone in 1972’s The Godfather and then, two years later, The Godfather Part II—was a huge challenge. A nonperson, almost. Formless at first, and then extremely dangerous. “Before filming started, I would take long walks up and down Manhattan, from Ninety-First Street to the Village and back, just thinking about how I was going to play him … He’s there and not there at the same time.” So Pacino made him at once blank and coiled. Cadaverous with power and repression. Given to lethal understatement, and with a strange, perfumed economy of gesture.

[From the June 1972 issue: David Denby’s review of The Godfather]

Playing Sonny Wortzik, the flailing, wired bank robber/accidental hostage-taker of Dog Day Afternoon (1975), was paradoxically more straightforward. Here Lumet set him in his element: overheated Brooklyn on the verge of Babylonian breakdown, a whole society doing the Method, as it were, triggering and retriggering itself. The mob is aroused and labile; the lumpy cops have no control, over the situation or over themselves. Trapped and pop-eyed, strutting around wildly under the terrible fluorescent tubes of the bank interior, Sonny channels it all, sweating through his off-white shirt, flapping his soiled handkerchief. He goes into the street screaming “Attica! Atti-ca!”—an improvisation—and the crowd of extras, to quote Sonny Boy, goes “fucking crazy.”

Does he harden into caricature in his later roles? In some of those films (Sea of Love, Carlito’s Way), I see him operating on a kind of scorching autopilot. Then there’s Scent of a Woman. I could watch this movie all day, and sometimes do. In it, the late-Pacino manner, the bark and the bluster, transcends itself, because here he’s playing a man who is all manner, all bark and bluster, a husk of a man, a hollowly booming, mirthlessly laughing man: Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade, blind man, in despair—“I’m in the DARK HERE!”—whose communication style is basically cranked-up Al Pacino.

“The profession of acting,” Strasberg said, “the basic art of acting, is a monstrous thing because it is done with the same flesh-and-blood muscles with which you perform ordinary deeds, real deeds.” Sonny Boy gives us the Pacino of ordinary deeds, bumbling around and having his experiences, and we see that he is in service—in thrall—to Pacino the actor. And if a certain fuzziness or impressionism attends his memories, well, we get it: He doesn’t want to violate, with too much insight, the precious mystery at the core of his craft. Doesn’t want to compromise who he is when he’s listening to Beethoven.

This article appears in the November 2024 print edition with the headline “Scent of a Man.”