Al Pacino is so famous for going overboard that you can easily forget how good he is at conveying quiet resignation. In The Godfather Part II, Donnie Brasco, The Insider, and large parts of Carlito’s Way, Pacino beautifully embodies a type of wounded masculinity, playing characters who aren’t happy with how their lives have turned out but whose integrity demands they sleep in the bed they’ve made. The actor can communicate years’ worth of disappointment with a sigh, drawn-out line reading, or downcast expression. Guilt seems to exert physical force on his sadder characters, who go about their business as if in constant, aching pain.
Like a character in a children’s book, Manglehorn communicates best with animals and young children. His grade-school-aged granddaughter reveres him, and he also has an unlikely fan in a sleazy tanning salon owner named Gary (filmmaker Harmony Korine, in an oddball performance that wouldn’t be out of place in one of his own movies), who had the old man as a Little League coach and still regards him as a sage. Manglehorn’s interactions with adults, however brief, tend to be positive. As a locksmith, he works to help people out of little jams, and his limited social life also consists of good turns—being a memorably pleasant customer at the bank, keeping veterans company at the American Legion. An odd, yet mostly genial presence, he seems to exist to perk up other people’s days. That might sound trivial, but think of how much worse public life would be without such individuals—Manglehorn might struggle sometimes to be nice, but never in vain.
