Scent of a Woman - movie reviews

  Al Pacino and his greatest movie!

In 1975, Dino Risi, who had directed the brilliant Il sorpasso (The Easy Life), made a pleasantly mediocre movie, Profumo di donna (Scent of a Woman), from a novel by Giovanni Arpino. It starred Vittorio Gassman as an ex-army captain who lost his sight and one hand in a freak accident, and who, too proud to let the world know he is blind, lives a sequestered life except for occasional jaunts around Italy, for which he hires some young soldier on leave to be his seeing-eye boy, whom he always calls Ciccio. His adventures with the current Ciccio are told with a mixture of comedy and sentimentality, ending in a specious romance.

Hollywood has bought the title, Scent of a Woman, and the basic situation. But Bo Goldman’s screenplay upgrades the captain into Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade, and downgrades everything else into the crassest and crudest comedy-drama. Slade is even allowed to keep both hands: Al Pacino, who plays him, must not look crippled in any way, and besides . . . but let’s not anticipate.

In Goldman’s version, the point of view is that of the boy, Charlie Simms, a poor young man on scholarship at a posh New England private school, who sees some of his rich, spoiled classmates pull a naughty prank on Mr. Trask, the nasty headmaster, who is evidently also stupid enough to fall for it. Charlie (Chris O’Donnell) won’t squeal on the perpetrators, and Trask gives him the upcoming Thanksgiving weekend to come across or lose his chances at Harvard the next fall. In the midst of this quandary, the poor (in both senses) boy takes on the job of looking after Colonel Slade while his niece, with whom he grudgingly lives, goes off on a weekend vacation with her family. Why the enormously self-sufficient Slade would need Charlie’s reluctant services at all remains unclear.

Slade, a drunkard and a bully, immediately bellows at and brutalizes Charlie; he proclaims preppies "a bunch of runny-nosed snots in tweed jackets, all studying to be George Bush." He so intimidates Charlie that the boy almost turns down the job. And then the surprise: Slade has planned a weekend in New York City. They are to stay at the Waldorf, eat at the Plaza’s Oak Room, get a woman for Frank, and (as Charlie learns later on), at the end, Frank will blow out his brains with his old service revolver.

In New York, things become more preposterous by the minute. Getting from the Waldorf to the Oak Room proves a bit of problem (couldn’t they have stayed at the Plaza?) until a nice cabbie is finally found. At the Oak Room, Frank shouts in his usual drill-masterly way, but no one minds in the least. A visit to Frank’s brother in suburbia ("Let’s surprise him: give that fat heart of his an attack!") ends disastrously, but during cocktail hour at the Trump Tower, Frank gets to dance a mean tango with a young woman whose date is late. Though Gabrielle Anwar is charming, the scene is remarkably unpoignant. For one thing, although it was possible to believe of Vittorio Gassman that he could identify the scent (perfume) of a woman and base on it an accurate character analysis, the only thing we could believe from Al Pacino is a disquisition on body odor.

The first peak of absurdity is reached when Slade, having wangled a Ferrari from the dealer for a test drive, proceeds, in the wee hours, to race the sports car at top speed in downtown Manhattan. At this point, we are forced to draw three conclusions: first, this man is a swine, so to endanger the life of his passenger, Charlie; second, Charlie is an imbecile not to jump out of the car at whatever cost; and third, the director, Martin Brest, is a fool to allow Bo Goldman to write such nonsense.

Almost equally pitiful is the scene in which Charlie tries to talk Frank, by now his surrogate father, out of committing suicide. Pointing the gun at him now, Frank growls, "I don’t know whether to shoot you or adopt you," which gives Charlie and the audience a pretty fair example of Hobson’s choice. But the second peak of absurdity is not reached until Mr. Trask conducts a McCarthy-style hearing in his school’s auditorium, complete with microphones and the presence of all students, teachers, and parents. Frank Slade, claiming to be a relative, acts as Charlie’s counsel, and delivers an oration of epic length full of heroic platitudes.

I am surely betraying no secret if I tell you that the devil (Mr. Trask) is shamed, Charlie exonerated, the bloom back on the rose, and Hollywood knee-deep in the usual self-righteous saccharin. It takes the wretched movie two and a half hours, and Pacino enough decibels to stun an ox, to arrive at its foregone conclusion. Even those reviewers who had doubts about the picture tended to extol Pacino’s performance as great. For a chaingang boss or a carnival barker, it would be.

About the author:
Mr. Simon, NR’s film critic,is also theater critic for New York magazines. COPYRIGHT 1993 National Review, Inc. COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group

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