Toronto Film Festival: Al Pacino’s ‘Humbling’ goes the art-life route

There are many ways that fallen-from-grace veteran actors can work their way back into our consciousness, but perhaps none more popular than playing fallen-from-grace-veteran actors.

It’s a recipe followed with varying effectiveness by a number of performers over the years, and one undertaken by Al Pacino in his new movie “The Humbling,” which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on Thursday ahead of a release in November. Pacino these days seems a fair bit removed from his “Godfather” and “Scarface” and “Heat” heyday — which is why his incarnation of Simon Axler, a veteran actor far from some of his best roles as he attempts a Broadway turn in “As You Like It,” seems just about the right dose of meta.

And while it’s not a perfect parallel, Pacino says you could be forgiven for making some comparisons.

“If you’re an actor, age and life and wear and tear starts to find its way, as it does for Simon,” Pacino, 74, said in an interview at the festival Friday. ”I think the difference is that Simon doesn’t have any anything to fall back on, and I have three children, which is why I’m still here making movies.”

Directed by Barry Levinson and adapted from a late-era Philip Roth novel, “The Humbling” follows a man who’s come undone. In fact, his mental state is such that even an attempt to emulate Ernest Hemingway’s chosen method of suicide goes awry. “I lost my talent for no good reason and now just as arbitrarily I’m losing my desire to kill myself,” he says at one point.

That changes, or at least gets shaken up, with the arrival of Pegeen (Greta Gerwig), a chameleon-like younger woman who claims to be a childhood admirer and (former?) lesbian, who begins a sexually charged relationship with Simon that both energizes and unsettles him. Much of what unfolds is shot with a kind of free-associative approach that mirrors Simon’s own tenuous mental state.

The movie is a passion project for Pacino, who bought rights to Roth’s book himself and then decided with Levinson to make it on a micro-budget over just 20 days to keep creative control. He said that though he remains prolific — a turn as Jack Kevorkian in an HBO movie is one of the better-regarded roles in recent years, to go with more paycheck-y parts — he related to much of what Axler, who questions whether he still has the necessary drive, has gone through.

“It could sound a little pretentious, but at this stage there are things I could have done 20 years ago I have no appetite for,” Pacino said.

Instead, he is seeking out parts that are more personal, and even sometimes relate specifically to his own circumstances.

“There’s a Napoleon project I wouldn’t have related to at all that I’m now very interested in,” he said. He laughed, “I’m not saying I’m acting like Napoleon. But there’s something about the end of his life that I responded to.”

Levinson said he directed “Humbling” with the knowledge that Pacino, who also has taken on his share of Shakespearean parts on the stage, had a personal relationship to the subject.

“This is not Al Pacino or his life on-screen, but it’s about what he knows as an actor and what he knows about the sacrifices.” (Incidentally, this is also one of the themes of award-season buzz title “Birdman,” but more on that movie in other posts.)

Gerwig added that she thought the film spoke to a universal issue among actors of any age.

“It’s the Sisyphean plight of being an artist,” she said. “Actors are and writers are people who feel things intensely, and then they’re put in a place where they’re judged,” she said. The kiss of death, she and Pacino said, could be praise, which is why, she added, one often wants “to look for something nascent and not established.”

At this stage of his career, Pacino is the opposite of that. But he will continue to try to reestablish himself at Toronto with the premiere of a second movie, David Gordon Green’s Texas-themed “Mangelhorn.” He isn’t playing an aging actor in that, is he?

“No,” he said of his character. ”But I am aging.”