Revisiting Corleone, Carlito, Montana, Lefty and Slade becomes less an act of fandom than a study of what ambition and survival look like with ageThere are coincidences that feel frivolous, and others that acquire, with passing years, the gravity of a private metaphor. Sharing birthday with Al Pacino belongs to the latter.It is, in itself, a trivial datum. And yet, as the years accumulate with their quiet insistence, it becomes less a coincidence than a mirror held at an oblique angle to one’s own life.One does not, in younger days, inhabit such mirrors. One admires from a safe distance. Pacino’s portrayals were then an emblem of intensity, a study in volcanic will, a performer whose characters seemed to exist at a higher temperature than ordinary life.
But age has a peculiar way of dismantling that distance. It draws the viewer into complicity.
