Critics reviews

It's possible that those wishing to adapt Roth took note of Elegy and realized the author could be best done justice by taking on his shorter works. Enter The Humbling, the most adventurous Roth adaptation precisely because the sparse source material proves amenable to extensive reimagining.

Barry Levinson's The Humbling is frisky and buoyant, with laughs that bubble up unpredictably, often when you least expect them. It's also improbably moving, especially considering how irreverent it is toward its source book.

This is the bizarre paradox of The Humbling: On Pacino's shoulders, the film comes perilously close to working, but when it needs Axler to come into contact with other human life forms, it grows both rancid and listless, playing for noxious belly laughs on the side.

[It's] a film that's surprisingly, arrestingly vital—ragged, to be sure, but very much alive... For every element that doesn't work—early scenes are sluggish; a subplot involving a transgender ex of Pegeen's (Billy Porter) comes across as cartoonish; a climactic shouting match falls flat—there's a moment that crackles with electricity and conviction. Humility sometimes leads to renewed effort. There's plenty of it here.

And then comes The Humbling, Barry Levinson's bizarre, blundering, pointless misreading of Philip Roth's penultimate novel... It's in trying to sort out the affair that this Humbling (as adapted by Buck Henry and Michal Zebede) itself nosedives into the pit by playing everything as morbid farce when Roth took his hero's sexual reawakening very seriously.

Both films are about ageing and decline, both are indulgent of Pacino's grandiloquent tendencies, and neither is a success, though the Levinson film has a good half hour of very funny multiple-irony farce in it.

Where Inarritu's exuberant style piece calls to mind the likes of Fosse and Fellini, "The Humbling" feels closer to the intimate theater/film hybrid works of Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn ("My Dinner With Andre," "Vanya on 42nd Street") in its lo-fi aesthetics and gently playful sense of art imitating life imitating art.