When you’re both old and famous, you’re supposed to get a stylist who makes you look like Christian Bale. You know: tasteful, conservative, able to be placed handsomely into the audience shot during any Meryl Streep acceptance speech. Normally, before they take you out in public, they crop your hair close to your head and your suit close to your body and clothe you in simple fabrics sharp enough to erase the fact that you are probably wrinkled and rumpled and don’t understand why anyone would dress like or listen to Billie Eilish. You know, that you’re old. In Hollywood you’re supposed to get old like Anthony Hopkins got old. I bet every old-person-stylist in Hollywood has a photograph of Anthony Hopkins from the 2015 Oscars pinned to his mirror like a barber has pictures of Brad Pitt.
But you know what 2020 Al Pacino is doing? Well, he’s not doing the fucking Anthony Hopkins. Which is why he’s the best thing about awards season, if you ask me. I mean, don’t get me wrong—I like Anthony Hopkins and would love to be seated next to him at a dinner sponsored by a handbag company. But Al Pacino is wrecking America. He’s the only person who shook me from my red carpet stupor during the Golden Globes. Fuck it: I’m saying he’s the most courageous man in American fashion. Dressing like Genghis Khan at a disco or Queen Anne on her way to a beheading isn't that courageous in 2020. Dressing like you play bass in an avant-garde brunch jazz ensemble when you’re at the Screen Actors Guild Awards…that is courageous.
Al Pacino doesn’t look like a man with a stylist. He looks like Steven Tyler’s road manager from the '80s who hasn’t left Topanga Canyon since the Doobie Brothers broke up and remains tethered to the outside world only by his cat sitter, the delivery guy from Factor’s Deli, and the boxes of silk scarves he has flown in weekly from Antibes. Look at Pacino at the step-and-repeat with his giant mane of clearly 79-year-old hair: No one is “saving” Al Pacino from himself. And what’s better than that? What’s better than seeing someone on a red carpet and actually having a sense of what they’re all about? He’s Al Pacino! He’s not gonna recede into the background.
I didn’t know what the term “chewing scenery” meant until I read reviews of Al Pacino movies. And look at his outfit at the Globes: That’s a suit custom-made for eating an entire Hollywood lot. It has scenery crumbs all over it. You want to know what’s inside the mind of a Boomer? Like really in there? Inside the mind of every 70-year-old is a vision of himself as Al Pacino, striding into a fancy Hollywood dinner, dressed like a former member of the E Street Band, dressed like a legendary magician. Not some shitty bar mitzvah magician. A guy who’s going to make the whole of Las Vegas disappear. If he can just find his reading glasses.
Look, you don’t like it? Fine. It’s not for you, anyway. It’s Al Pacino’s fantasy, we’re just watching it on Instagram. You can keep your respectable older actors who’ve gone through the Christian Bale machine, your army of neutered former wild men who’ve been made to look suave and of the moment. I’ll take Al Pacino. Get ready, Oscars, because this man is going to tear the house down. And also possibly saw a woman in half while playing the saxophone.
