Better In Your Head?--THE HUMBLING

 

Spoiler Alert: bisexuals are magic.

THE BOOK-Written by Philip Roth, released 2009

THE MOVIE-Directed by Barry Levinson, written by Buck Henry & Michal Zebede (& Levinson, unc.)

THE STORY-What fate rates worst? Abrupt defeat or protracted decline? Whatever your answer, don't bother telling Simon Axler. The legendary stage actor has lost his gift for artifice, and found in its usual place a crisis of confidence. 

MIND THE GAP-Depressed old guy, of course he'll be seeking validation via virility. 

Roth's penultimate book was his fourth death-fixated volume in as many years. The start heaves with narrative promise: "He'd lost his magic." 140 pages later, hyper-indulgent old-man meandering heaves all over said promise, a bubbly, stinky sheet of sick that sometimes looks worse than it smells, the scrambled dregs of a slow and broken life. 

Little wonder The Humbling spoke so fiercely to the artistic soul of Alfredo Pacino. Veteran of the planks, effusively praised, seldom doubted--until he can no longer cut the butter. No longer a supple exemplar of the art of pretend, and unable to quit the production, Simon Axler holes up in the green room, waiting for a restorative jolt. An extended stay in a psychiatric hospital provides a twitch, but the surprise arrival of a woman from the past is a six-pack of lightning best enjoyed over multiple sittings. Her name is Pegeen (ugh) and she's the daughter of Simon's old theatre friends. For the last sixteen years, she's slept exclusively with women, but her last girlfriend transitioned into a heterosexual male, so why can't Pegeen try being a heterosexual woman?

Great casting is dishonored by a script equal parts inventive and indecisive. Pacino digs hardily into the ribs of the role, working every wrinkle and disheveled hair masterfully as he shuffles scene to scene. He is most compelling when at his most confounded. And if anyone can monologue on lost mojo more stirringly than Al Pacino...no, they can't.

From the moment of her sudden appearance to the moment of her drawn-out departure, Greta Gerwig is a prickly refugee from a wildly popular Nineties film of tenuous influence. She's both the great redeemer and humbled recipient of absolution. Physically, both she and Pacino are wrong for their parts--he's too short, too lank; she's a decade too young, and remains recognizably feminine whatever her fashion--but an alternative universe where an adaptation of The Humbling was made without them seems impossible. Although that might be because I don't want to imagine another realm of existence where this movie was made at all.

The love affair falls apart after a threesome. The mathematics of love dictate: two plus one is not addition, it is division.

"I don't think you fucked the lesbian outta me yet." Sometimes I question my commitment to Sparkle Motion, y'all.

BETTER IN YOUR HEAD-A strange specimen, The Humbling. The story (creative guy wracked by self-doubt and betrayed by his own instincts, meets another professionally vain creature, pair travel entwined down the last slime trail towards death's toothless maw) is well-told..if not always told well. Consider the author. When She Was Good, Portnoy's Complaint. Consider the director. Diner, Rain Man. Consider the cast. Dog Day Afternoon, Frances Ha, Hannah and Her Sisters, Kinky Boots. Whatever the medium, there is little worth recalling here, little worth revisiting, little to endorse or condemn. The film eases up on the bleakness and smut, to no benefit. There's a couple laugh-out-loud moments in the movie, one of them intentionally so, and that convinced me Levinson messed up by not making The Humbling a full-on comedy.

Stating a preference feels like faking an orgasm. 

Roth's concern--obsession?--is the intimacy of death and dying. The book's length prevents too deep a probe. A curse in 1989, a blessing in 2009. The screenplay is bloated in comparison. For the mercy of brevity, I proclaim the book less painful, and thus, "better."