THE HUMBLING Al Pacino

After watching Everybody’s Fine, I was glad that Robert De Niro found his comeback gig and he gave his best performance in years. Which brings me to wonder if the same luck could happen to my favorite character actor of all time, Al Pacino. Can he remove the dirt that were 88 Minutes and Righteous Kill? Better question yet, how come the greats like De Niro and Pacino don’t get called by Spielberg and Cameron for big budget projects? I don’t remember them ever been in any sci-fi blockbuster. Pacino is about to embark on an adaptation and judging from the logline, I doubt that this would be strong enough to be his comeback gig…

According to NYTimes, Al Pacino bought his first book-movie rights and it’s an adaptation of THE HUMBLING based on the book by Philip Roth.
Pacino will play the lead and Barry Levinson (Rain Man) is set to direct using the script written by the 79 year old scribe Buck Henry (The Graduate, To Die For).
The thing is… author Roth, through THE HUMBLING, pretty much deals with the same issue again as the ones tackled in his previous work The Human Stain and Elegy which were also turned into movies.
It’s about an aging stage actor who finds hope of renewal through a younger woman, how many more of this concept (old men rejuvenated through affair with a younger woman) do we need to encounter? It gets old.. no pun intended. On the other hand, stage acting was how Pacino got started decades ago, so he’s right for the role.

Here’s the official synopsis of the book..
Everything is over for Simon Axler, the protagonist of Philip Roth’s startling new book. One of the leading American stage actors of his generation, now in his sixties, he has lost his magic, his talent and his assurance. His Falstaff and Peer Gynt and Vanya, all his great roles, ‘are melted into air, into thin air’. When he goes on stage he feels like a lunatic and looks like an idiot. His confidence in his powers has drained away; he imagines people laughing at him; he can no longer pretend to be someone else. ‘Something fundamental has vanished.’ His wife has gone, his audience has left him, his agent can’t persuade him to make a comeback. Into this shattering account of inexplicable and terrifying self-evacuation bursts a counterplot of unusual erotic desire, a consolation for the bereft life so risky and aberrant that it points not towards comfort and gratification but to a yet darker and more shocking end. In this long day s journey into night, told with Roth s inimitable urgency, bravura and gravity, all the ways that we persuade ourselves of our solidity, all our life s performances talent, love, sex, hope, energy, reputation are stripped off. Following the dark meditations on mortality and endings in Everyman and Exit Ghost, and the bitterly ironic retrospect on youth and chance in Indignation, Roth has written another in his haunting group of late novels. The Humbling is Roth s thirtieth book.