My admiration for Lumet and Pacino has had discernible limits in the past, but here, happily, I can change my tune. Lumet, at fifty much less of a show-off than Lumet at thirty-five or forty, directs with simplified technique and deepened perceptions. Pacino is not called on here to radiate quiet power, at which he failed in both Godfather films. Here he is fortune’s fool—a pawn who is being played at the same time that he thinks he’s masterminding the game. This summer I went to a racetrack for the first time in ten years, and outside the gate there was a tout selling a tip sheet for a dollar—eight sure winners. His elbows were sticking out of his ragged jacket, but he had eight sure winners. Pacino, about to lick his condition in the world and his personal troubles by being smarter than the world, has his figurative elbows sticking out. The pseudosuperiority, this pathos of self-deceived bravado, Pacino handles very well.
Before My Eyes: Film Comment And Criticism
Stanley Kauffmann