Word: pacino
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Icounted. Al Pacino, fire-mouthed, hell-bent and irresistably cool, had indeed said it over 160 times. "Fuck." "Fuck you." "You fucking asshole." "Get the fuck out of here." By the time he landed dead in a pool swelling with the red of his own blood at the end of "Scarface," Pacino had become a hero to the dispossessed. He was the toughest bad guy in Hollywood, and only a wave of submachine-gun fire powerful enough to crack the USS New Jersey in two could bring him to his final, glorious swan dive...
What those watching and listening to Pacino's devilish sound-bites had been overpowered by was his believability. Pacino was not Pacino; he was Scarface. By that token, though, he never is. In "Glengarry Glen Ross," the new movie based on the play by David Mamet, Pacino is a salesman, Ricky Roma...
...sells us on the idea that life stinks when you're at the bottom. The mud of American society is filled with salesmen. They make little money, fight insanely hard for it and go home with no pride at the end of the day. Pacino, in the role of Roma, has made it to the top of this dung heap...
...indisputable master of earthly hell and knows it; wherever he goes, Pacino manipulates, sells and scrounges. If one ever wonders where Roma gets his incredible powers, she need look no further than the devil himself. Only Satan could inspire treachery like Ricky Roma's: He won't go back on a sale even if it means it will cost the customer his marriage; he feeds the egos of co-workers in order to maintain their tenuous loyalties; Roma even sits back when the co-worker he adored just five minutes ago is pegged by the police...
...salesmen have to believe that listening implies complicity -- that the moment a mark is seated across the living room, or has just picked up a phone, he has declared himself a co-conspirator in the scam. Ace huckster Ricky Roma (Al Pacino) knows this better than anyone else. Lately, Ricky has been the "closer," the high man on the company's totem pole. And Shelley Levene (Jack Lemmon) is the Loman. Vending his unplowed dreams, Shelley woos like a Don Juan of property values. But when the courtship is over or aborted, he looks old, depleted, desperate. He sweats...