Man­gle­horn

Direc­tor David Gor­don Green has come full cir­cle. Man­gle­horn, his tenth fea­ture, dis­plays many of the rhap­sod­ic qual­i­ties of his first fea­ture, 2000’s George Wash­ing­ton, in that both are pre­dom­i­nant­ly inter­est­ed in cul­ti­vat­ing tex­ture and a sense of place.

Both films pos­sess only the most mea­gre thread of what you might term a nar­ra­tive, but Green has reached a point in his career where he sees that exam­in­ing the inter­play between peo­ple and land­scapes is more cin­e­mat­ic that focus­ing on just the peo­ple or just the land­scapes. And as with the major­i­ty of Green’s films and TV works, the locales of the South­ern states of Amer­i­ca are depict­ed as utopi­an idylls where white peo­ple and black peo­ple cohab­it with no hint of racial ten­sion. It’s only class divi­sons which cre­ate shit­ty days.

Ange­lo Man­gle­horn (Al Paci­no) is an age­ing, mild­ly decrepit and crotch­ety Tex­an lock­smith who pines for his lost love – Clara. He mails her mawk­ish love let­ters writ­ten in a child­ish scrawl, gen­tly beg­ging for her to return to him, but to no avail. The film shows how he is able to locate the courage to move on with his life and accept his loss as a les­son for the future. The mate­r­i­al feels jer­ry-rigged to allow Paci­no plen­ty of wig­gle-room with­in the role, and his stac­ca­to deliv­ery, his spiky com­port­ment, his ​‘hoo-hah!’ brava­do, his ​“thing,” have rarely looked so adorably pitiful.

Man­gle­horn slinks around town with his back-combed hair and tiny eye-glass­es, meets his ingrate son who works as a trad­er, takes his cat to the vet to have a key removed from her intestines, and effort­less­ly charms a friend­ly bank teller (Hol­ly Hunter), but is thrown into a tail­spin when she starts to return his off-the-cuff come-hith­ers. He has a con­ver­sa­tion with his pre-teen grand­daugh­ter about whether you can see the wind. And that’s pret­ty much the tall and short of it.

Har­mo­ny Korine turns up and is very fun­ny as a brash ex-pupil from Manglehorn’s for­ma­tive years as a foot­ball coach, a tin­pot entre­pre­neur with hands­free ear­phone and pork-pie hat who self-describes as The Tan­man, on account of his seedy tan­ning salon/​brothel. Icky though this may sound, all the peo­ple Man­gle­horn comes into con­tact with love him and want to help him, and though he’s nev­er less than affa­ble towards them, hes won’t let them know what the prob­lems is.

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. In the bank, a large man enters clutch­ing a bou­quet of flow­ers and starts to sing. Green nev­er states whether he’s insane, eccen­tric, or just being over-friend­ly. The bank staff nei­ther smile or gri­mace, car­ry­ing on with their jobs. They just comprehend.

Man­gle­horn is packed with such gor­geous grace-notes. And just as Green’s pre­vi­ous fea­ture, Joe, could be read as a ten­der extrap­o­la­tion of Nico­las Cage’s duel image of seri­ous actor and action idol, Man­gle­horn is a film which says that per­haps Paci­no is an vet­er­an star who needs to con­sid­er sev­er­ing ties from his ​’70s sal­ad days and com­pre­hend that he still has a whole lot to give to the world if he only just knew it.