Critics reviews

David Gordon Green is a modest filmmaker, but he lays his modesty on with a trowel. If the extended dream sequence of a car accident riddled with busted watermelons wasn't enough; if the Al Pacino character's profession—he's a keymaker who can't unlock the key… to his own heart!—weren't clear enough... there's more: a final Grace Note™ in which Mr. Manglehorn has a last interaction with a mime, in which the wise and wordless one helps him use an invisible key to unlock a car door.

It's a small but exquisite film in which Green has taken no scene or shot for granted. He acknowledges happenstance, but never in a way which comes across as contrived or wacky. It's a lived in world where strange things happen, but strange things that people are used to.

Almost nothing happens in the film beyond Pacino's character bumbling melancholically from one encounter to the next. It's a film about a listless life undone by its own listlessness, with first-time screenwriter Paul Logan making the fatal, very first-timey error of allowing the story's content to prescribe the manner of its telling.

The movie is, in effect, an inducement to savour the rich instrument of Pacino's voice. Green is that rare filmmaker who has managed to be influenced by Terrence Malick without being wholly in thrall to him (he is funny, for example, which Malick hasn't been since Badlands), and this expresses itself in part in his use of voiceover. While we watch Manglehorn, he appears as someone we wouldn't glance twice at on the street – but that voice banishes any illusion of averageness.

Though it's largely set in run-down, blue-collar environments, Green conveys a sense of childlike wonder throughout, imbuing everyday experience with unaccountable richness... Pacino's careful, Method-style performance registers, in these environments, as another example of old-school craftsmanship, which adds to its poignancy.

Green clearly wants to break free of the typical molds of telling these stories. He experiments stylistically now and then with slow motion, flash-forwards, and elliptical cutting, and you can sense his frustration, his desire to impose some personality over this small slice of life... [But] there's a powerful austerity to Manglehorn the man's tale that Manglehorn the film itself — well acted and touching though it often is — doesn't quite match.

David Gordon Green's Manglehorn turns a gently critical eye to this notion of "specialness"—and the result is delightfully offbeat, in no small part thanks to its central performance... Manglehorn is modest in scope, but ambitious in execution. Green delivers a charmingly idiosyncratic piece of storytelling, cat surgery and all.

Green's subjective and impressionistic editing, shooting, and sound are annoyingly fancy and determinedly gritty at the very same time. Still, Pacino makes Manglehorn's anguish palpably real. The movie manages to be arresting when Green just lets his star rip with actors playing characters who try to lift Manglehorn up or tear him down.

Directed by David Gordon Green, Manglehorn seems designed as a cousin to his previous film, Joe, another downbeat character study featuring an unusually low-key performance by an actor known for going way over the top... As the film goes along, though, it starts getting goofier, and not in a good way.

In the hands of Mr. Pacino, a story of self-realization has a bit more groove in its step than it usually does (and shades of darker moods). Mr. Green drops in some slam-dunk details, like the bees' nest on Manglehorn's mailbox (which he, slow to change, works around). But in truth, it's less "Manglehorn" than Mr. Pacino that you warm up to in this film, as so many times before.

If you've dreamt of watching Al Pacino mumble-sing "It's Only a Paper Moon" to a fluffy white feline, this is your movie. When talking to people, such as his embittered, semi-estranged bigshot son (Chris Messina), or a clearly smitten bank clerk (Holly Hunter), Manglehorn seems scarcely less distracted. It's hardly an unshowy performance, but as a display of technical virtuosity, it's surprising and rangy from an actor frequently accused of self-parody in recent years.

Manglehorn is another of Pacino's asshole-redemption fables, in the tradition of Sea of Love, Scent of a Woman, and the recent Danny Collins, in which his emotionally shut-off protagonist must learn to love again. Green uses that basic story as a pretense for throwing all sorts of symbols and anecdotes at the audience, showing us the world that Manglehorn's bitterness is shutting him off from. In this fashion, Green mildly questions our inherent attachment to Pacino's archetypal narcissist.