Manglehorn – Review

Manglehorn, a film starring Academy Award winner Al Pacino and directed by David Gordon Green (Pineapple Express) was always going to be interesting. The film follows Manglehorn (Al Pacino), a solitary locksmith who cares for his cat and granddaughter, but little else apart from a long lost love, Clara, to whom he writes endless letters of regret. His routine is his comfort, and breaks from it lead to anger just below the surface coming out. Part of his routine is to meet with a friendly bank clerk, Dawn (Holly Hunter) on Fridays to lodge his cheque and discuss their pets. This new woman in his life (as new women are wont to do) begins to change him and distract him from his fixation with Clara.

Perhaps Manglehorn’s greatest failing is that it didn’t realise it was a beautiful arthouse film. The cinematography and the layering of kaleidoscope images (done as well as those of Jonathan Glazer in Under the Skin) both place the audience in a slightly surreal state where its members are left feeling separate and disconnected from everything in the film, just as Manglehorn himself is. Some really stand-out sequences make a stunning impact, and hints of miracles or magic that float just below the surface build up the beautiful ambiguity of the film.

Despite all of its potential and beauty, the film for some reason plods along with this “woman redeeming a lonely man” plot. It neatly wraps up ends in ways that seem very inconsistent with the characters involved, and ends on an angle far duller than any of the ones the film had previously hinted at. By the final twenty minutes you are left disinterested in Manglehorn or his kitty cat, but somewhere in there was a gorgeous idea that got lost.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *