Danny Collins (15)
two stars
Dir: Dan Fogelman
With: Al Pacino, Annette Bening, Jennifer Garner
HERE'S a bargain. Last week you might have paid the price of a small car for an evening in the company of Al Pacino at the SECC. This week he is on offer for under a tenner at your local cinema in the comedy drama, Danny Collins. No madam, we cannot throw in Robert De Niro in a BOGOF deal. Michael Mann already did that in his crime drama, Heat.
Pacino plays the titular Collins, an ageing rock star having a late-life crisis. With a supporting cast that includes Annette Bening, Jennifer Garner, Christopher Plummer and Bobby Cannavale, Dan Fogelman's picture is proof that a terrific cast can make almost anything sing.
But it also demonstrates what we might call the Law of Mary Poppins. In any comedy drama a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down, but any more than that and queasiness descends. While it begins tartly enough, Danny Collins is ultimately harder on the stomach than a sail across the Atlantic in a bathtub during a force 10 gale.
We first meet Collins as a dewy youngster who is being told by the music press that he is the next John Lennon. But cut to the Noughties and Danny has turned into the next Liberace. Dyed bouffant hair, girdle, a front row as old as he is, he is cranking out the old hits and raking in the dollars required to support his private jet and multiple mansions lifestyle.
At his birthday party, his agent (Christopher Plummer) presents him with a gift - a letter of encouragement John Lennon once wrote to Danny but which somehow went astray. It is the sign Danny has been waiting for to clean up his act, get back to songwriting basics, be the person he was meant to be and all that other cat poster stuff.
So Danny leaves LA for New Jersey and checks into a hotel run by the straight talking Mary (Annette Bening). Up the road lives the son (Bobby Cannavale) Danny has never taken the trouble to meet. Can this old cat change his spots? Or do we all end up with the life we deserve?
In answering these questions, Fogelman, the writer of Crazy, Stupid Love, here making his directorial debut, initially takes the softly-softly approach. Pacino goes the other way, playing up to all the ageing singer cliches with brave, painful honesty. This is Pacino in Scent of a Woman "HOO-AH!" mode, laying it all out there. It is wince-inducing but amusing stuff, even if the smile fades somewhat when stills from his old movies are used in mocked up album covers. Some things are sacred, people.
When the film is in home truths-telling mode it works as a wry, knowing piece about ageing, its trials and absurdities. A bonus is the soundtrack, crammed full of Lennon's songs. It is just a pity that Fogelman, a chewy enough story already in place, starts to lay the drama on even thicker. Before you know it, the pat answers and plot contrivances are piling up, and just when you think another syrupy twist will spark a reunion with your lunch, it starts - the beep, beep, beep of a lorry-load of pure sugar reversing into the film. The sweeter the stuff, the more Pacino goes over the top.
The Danny Collins character screams irony, but that is okay, the audience is in on the joke of a world famous actor playing a cheeseball singer. And a supporting cast of this calibre is always a joy to watch, whether it is Bening's twinkly matriarch, Garner's sensitive and wise daughter-in-law, or Cannevale in full wounded puppy mode. But perhaps there is just too much Pacino in Pacino these days. The legend precedes him everywhere, sometimes to his advantage, as in the early part of the picture, sometimes not.
Danny Collins is a flawed affair, then, like Danny Boy played on paper and comb. But as last week at the SECC showed, Pacino fans will adore anything he does. As Lennon once sang, whatever gets you through the night.
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