Al Pacino gives a performance in "Two for the Money" that could best be described as joyous — I don't think I've ever seen an actor have more fun with a role than Pacino does here. For the past five years, Pacino has been kicking ass and taking names in great movies like "Angels in America," "Simone," "The Merchant of Venice," "People I Know," and, of course, "Insomnia," arguably Pacino's greatest performance. All of these performances were nuanced and subtle, a welcome reprieve from the Hooah!-showiness that colored some of his work in the '90s. The last five years of Pacino's career put him over the top and established him as, without a doubt, the greatest actor of all time.
Still, it never really seemed like Pacino was having much fun in these recent movies, with the possible exception of "Angels in America." Why should he? These were grueling performances, where he was forced to play sad, desperate men confronting their failures. Still, these roles had a point: they were meant to stretch him as an actor after a decade of taking the easy way out. This is a welcome contrast to the camping up and selling out we've seen from many of Pacino's contemporaries over the past five years. While rivals De Niro, Hoffman and Walken have seen their legends blow away in a cloud of self-parody, Pacino has only grown in stature, finally getting the critics who unfairly mauled him in the '90s for the likes of "Any Given Sunday" and "The Godfather Part III" to concede that this guy just may be the GOAT.
In D.J. Caruso's "Two For The Money," Al Pacino can barely contain his joy over getting to play sports book Walter Abrams. The plot of the movie is pretty straightforward: Walter is a recovering gambling addict who has parlayed his knowledge of the gambling world into a moderately successful Manhattan sports book that sells sports picks to big-money gamblers. He takes in a young protégé (Matthew McConaughey, who holds his own nicely with Pacino) with an unprecedented ability to pick football games. They rise to the top of the sports book world together, along with Walter's wife Toni (Rene Russo), who regards Walter with love, exasperation and bewilderment. The three leads sink their teeth into their roles and create characters with surprising resonance and power.
As good as Russo and McConaughey are, this is the Al Pacino Show. It's not that Pacino has never had a role like this before, or that Walter Abrams is a once-in-a-lifetime role; rather, Pacino seems overjoyed at exactly how he's playing this role — restrained, confident and cool. Gone are the histrionics that plagued him after "Scent of a Woman." In their place we are overjoyed to find humility and tenderness. Walter Abrams may be a degenerate gambler and master manipulator, but Pacino brings a sense of humanity to the role that would have been missing if played by a lesser actor, or even if Pacino had played the role ten years ago.
The difference between his performance in this movie and roles of years past is what makes "Two For The Money" so special. I have to think that part of the reason Pacino interrupted his streak of risky, commercially iffy projects for a glossy studio movie like this was to show everybody how his craft has improved in the past five years. Let's face it: Al Pacino has been in this movie before. He has played the sociopath in Armani on numerous occasions, including two of his most critically bludgeoned films, "The Devil's Advocate" and "The Recruit." For whatever reason, the 20th century Pacino did not excel in these roles: he always went too far over the top and turned the whole thing into a cartoon, albeit a very interesting one. These roles, along with De Niro quietly mopping the floor with him in "Heat," gave birth to one of the more absurd notions in film history: the idea that all Al Pacino does is scream. Maybe he did channel Loud Al a little bit too much during the Clinton administration, but he also turned in brilliant, nuanced performances in "Donnie Brasco" and "Carlito's Way." For whatever reason, Loud Al was what everybody remembered from this era, probably because he had the bad fortune to have "Any Given Sunday" (featuring Pacino's immortal "Peace With Inches" soliloquy, which never fails to raise goosebumps) and "The Insider," two definitive examples of the Loud Al phenomenon, released within days of each other during December of 1999. Pacino took his lumps for those performances (neither of them really that bad) and people spent that Oscar season whispering that Loud Al may have cost Jaime Foxx a nomination for "Any Given Sunday" and cost "The Insider" a shot at best picture. Both of these arguments are bunk: Oliver Stone's ham-fisted direction cost Foxx and "The Insider", as good as it was, did not deserve to beat "American Beauty".
It would be three years before Pacino was in another Hollywood movie, and in that time, he transformed himself. Loud Al got killed off, and he began his current hot streak during which he underplayed all his roles. With "Two For The Money", he returns to the kind of role he would have played during the Loud Al era, but approaches it much differently. We get bursts of screaming in this film, but he doesn't hold it for two hours. Gone are the dyed, slicked back hair and monochromatic clothes, traded in for rimless spectacles, an unkempt salt-and-pepper mane and crisp Brooks Brothers duds, all of which makes him look like the most well-coiffed philosophy professor in history. Also gone are the slumped shoulders, drooping eyes and weather-beaten face. In "Two For The Money" he looks lean, tan and rested. For the first time in years, it looks like Al Pacino has some life in him.
It is fascinating the way Pacino makes the viewer care about Walter. In "The Devil's Advocate" and "The Recruit," he went over-the-top in an attempt to give his characters soul. The central mistake with this approach was that the characters he was playing — Satan and a dead-eyed CIA spook — were supposed to be soulless. Here, he probably could have turned Walter into another caricature and nobody would have minded. Hell, judging by some of the reviews I've read that are up in arms about glorifying Walter and his business, many people would have preferred Pacino to have turned Walter into a monster. The new Pacino knows that Walter is much more complex than that. He refuses to give the viewer the satisfaction of seeing Walter as just another shark in the dirty water. He dares us to identify and sympathize with a character that makes his living playing on the weakness of his fellow man. Walter is a man who does destructive things, not because he is a bad man, but because he is, by nature, a destroyer. We find out by the end of the movie, in devastating fashion, that Walter's drug of choice isn't booze, or coke, or cards: Walter Abrams is addicted to disaster. He's the ultimate tragic hero: a victim who victimizes, a man who can't control himself and his own stupid, selfish desires. Pacino, along with director D.J. Caruso and writer Dan Gilroy, want to dig at our societal ideals: the movie really isn't about gambling — the whole seedy enterprise is a Macguffin to get at the lack of responsibility in our society. The gamblers in the movie are driven by their addictions and get burned. We feel sorry for them. With a lesser actor in the role, we would watch as Walter wrestles with his addictions and we would say, "Oh good, he got what he deserved." Pacino makes us identify with Walter and his vices, which is simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying and will no doubt turn off some viewers. Walter's problems are dark and sinister and can't be boiled down to something as easy as "Oh, he has a problem with betting on the NFL." Like all addicts, his vices get the best of him, but with the way Pacino plays Walter, we don't feel happy because a bad guy got what was coming to him: we feel dismayed because a good man lost a battle with himself. Pacino isn't going to let us get away easy by thinking that a villain got his comeuppance. This is because Walter is not a bad man, just a weak one; the same as the people he manipulates every day. And that's a pretty bold move by a pretty good actor.
Grade: AB
