Chinese Coffee
                                                                                                        
Director: Al Pacino
Year: 2000
Rating: 6.0
I doubt I would have picked this to watch if not for Al Pacino and probably would not have finished it if not for Pacino. This is 100% Pacino with all of his formidable acting talents laid bare on the table. Every emotion - anger, frustration, whimsy, passion, self-awareness - put full frontal. This is an acting exercise. It is the sort of thing only a very good actor with experience would attempt. There are too many opportunities for failure. It is based on a play from Ira Lewis that Pacino loved and finally brought to the screen as director and actor (he had performed it on Broadway). He teams up with Jerry Orbach and it is for all purposes a two-man play set in one room with a few fleeting moments of memories and flashbacks that are edited in.  The two of them - friends in theory - vent, insult, reminisce, squabble, complain and criticize one another for 90-minutes in one evening. In the play it must have been exhausting for the actors. The dialogue is literate, cutting, funny, intellectual and gushing. It never stops. One or the other always has something to say or a retort. That might get bruising for the audience as well.   



Pacino plays a 50-year-old author with two books that have been published but that was years ago and he currently has $1.50 to his name. He has just been fired as a doorman at a French restaurant for not bowing and scaping enough to the customers. It is late at night but he goes to visit his friend played by Orbach in his apartment for two purposes - to collect his loan of $500 and to see if Orbach has read his latest manuscript. Orbach is in no better financial straits than Pacino - three months behind in rent and he can't help. He was a photographer in nightclubs but quit to go out on his own. It hasn't worked and at 60 year-old the options are closing in. Both of them are staring failure in the face and at a life impasse. Their conversation takes in a lot of territory from the personal to Tolstoy but it all has a certain ragging tone to it - Orbach in love with his words and happily metering out his thoughts and advice and anger. Pacino on the receiving end fires back.  It is the sort of night one of them should have called it quits to save their friendship but they both have stored up animosities to let out.  Perhaps every time they meet it is similar. A routine, a ritual. Two New York Greenwich Village bohemian artists in love with the spoken word. And two great actors speaking them.