Word: pacino
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...lost. On surface, this holiday movie season looks downright banal. But look closer and you'll find the hidden gems. Next week, Oliver Stone delivers the adrenaline extravaganza Any Given Sunday starring Al Pacino and Cameron Diaz. The same day (talk about counterprogramming hitting counterprogramming, thus eliminating the point of counterprogramming), Jim Carrey does Andy Kaufman in Milos Forman's Man on the Moon. In this issue, we give you a look at The Talented Mr. Ripley, Anthony Minghella's follow-up to The English Patient that stars Matt Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow in a wicked little tale about murder...
...Pacino's Lowell Bergman is unrelenting, highly moral, and loyal to Wigand during turbulent times. At first, Bergman's motives for courting Wigand seem a bit suspect and self-serving; there is an intriguing ambiguity to the character that is soon dropped and forgotten, much to the detriment of the character...
...Upstaging Pacino is Christopher Plummer as Mike Wallace; he's cocky as hell, he's arrogant, he's sometimes petulant, but he's got all the good lines and uses them well. A scenery-chewing performance could have done fine, but Plummer develops Wallace into something other than a flat parody; he makes a dynamic, human journey in minimal screen time and turns in an uncharacteristically strong supporting performance...
...greatest strength of the film is in its actors but in the last part of the film, Crowe's Wigand almost disappears, and Pacino's Bergman is given scenes full of moral posturing that are completely out of character. After weaving a difficult and astonishing narrative, Mann begins to lose the thread; he sacrifices complexity for black-and-white morality and substitutes shapeless confrontations for emotional depth...
...protagonists of the film, have not objected to Mann's portrayals of themselves and their stories. However, Bergman says his character in the film is "too neat" to really be him, and Wigand has said that he never quite sunk to the emotional depths that his character reached. Pacino has even been quoted as saying that his character, Bergman, "was a composite of three or four people in Michael's and [co-writer] Eric Roth's mind...