Word: pacino
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...PACINO scares people a little. It's not that they really believe he's like Michael Corleone, the ever colder, ever tougher youngest son he plays in The Godfather. But on the other hand, well...he was pretty damned convincing--that cool of his, that hard growing cool, was really too scary to seem anything but genuine. So here he is in the flesh, people can't help saying things like, "When you shot those two guys..." and "God, you sure wrecked that brother-in-law of yours...
...then, drunks in bars used to pick fights with Bogart to prove that they were as tough as his screen image--it's the price one pays. And Pacino doesn't seem to mind playing to his own brand-new myth. How did he get the role of Michael?, someone asks. "Oh, I can't talk about that," he replies, voice swollen with meaning. How did he feel playing that murderous restaurant scene? "To kill two people is really an incredible thing, quite an experience"--deadpan. People laugh nervously, impressed. It doesn't seem to occur to them that Pacino...
...Rabe is a plunger. Pavlo was his first play. (His second work, Sticks and Bones, develops related themes of the war's moral crippling in more dimensions.) Pavlo opened off-Broadway last year. It is now in a new production by the Theater Company of Boston, with Al Pacino as Pavlo. The twin trajectories of Rabe's fresh talent and Pacino's intersect with concussive impact, splattering the audience with agony and unexpected humor...
Pavlo tells how a Regular Army slob stumblingly pursues through boot camp and battle the mythic promise of the recruiting posters that THE ARMY WILL MAKE A MAN OF YOU! Pacino makes Pavlo a walking antipersonnel device, a Bouncing Betty that chops his foes, and himself, off at the crotch. Pacino's previous roles (most conspicuously, Michael in The Godfather) have blazed with a menace that he now transforms into a quivering, infantile bravado, a would-be Lieut. Galley, played for explosive laughs. The only buddy he rescues is a dead one. The only atrocity he achieves...
...basic training is on the way to becoming "the fattest rat in the finest cheese." Lost in the big world, Pavlo has adopted army standards and has committed himself to a pathetic struggle to meet them. Fresh from his overwhelming success as the son in the Godfather, Al Pacino gives a performance that can have no equal. "You're weird, Hummel," Kress, the squad bully tells him. "You don't even talk American, you talk Hummel--some god damned foreign language." And Pacino acts his own language, with a nuance and virtuosity that is wonderful...