I would never have heard of “The Humbling” if Google news alerts didn’t pop it up for a Shakespeare reference. It stars Al Pacino and is based on the Philip Roth novel, which I have not read.

The play opens with Pacino, dressed in a trenchcoat and looking like something out of Death of a Salesman, practicing the ages of man speech from As You Like It. It looks at first like he’s trying to remember his lines, but we soon see that he is trying to decide how he’s supposed to deliver them. The line between his acting and his reality is becoming a blur, and he’s having trouble differentiating between what he feels and what he’s only pretending to feel. After an event at the performance sends him to the hospital there’s a funny scene where he’s moaning in pain and asks the nurse, “Do you believe that? That I’m in pain?”  When she says she does he says, “I could do that better. Let me try it again,” and tries a different delivery. It’s not that he’s faking. He just can’t escape analyzing his own performance, even when it is reality.

Now we get to what I like to call the “not Shakespeare” part of the movie. He goes to rehab and meets a crazy stalker lady who wants him to kill her husband because as an actor he’s got experience. Then he comes home and starts a relationship with the daughter of some old friends of his, who happens to be a lesbian. He’s then quickly introduced to the past loves of her life, including the department head who she slept with to get her job, and a post-op transgender man who still wants her.

Or maybe not. Scenes often play out, only to reset as if they’d never happened. It becomes obvious that Pacino’s character is losing his mind, and some if not all of the above may not have ever happened. Throughout the film he engages in regular videoconference updates with his therapist, who also has trouble distinguishing what’s actually happening from what Pacino thinks is happening.

Now, back to the Shakespeare. After vowing never to get on stage again, Pacino is ultimately pulled back for a performance of King Lear. I mean sure, why not, a guy has a nervous breakdown during As You Like It, goes to rehab, swears off acting, of course you want to just throw him right into Shakespeare’s Mount Everest.  I’m ok with that, though, because it means we get to watch Al Pacino perform some of King Lear.

It’s an interesting movie, but it’s not a Shakespeare movie. It’s mostly Pacino, but in a way that I would have liked even more Pacino, if that makes sense? He’s surrounded by this crazy cast of characters that are all trying to take the focus away from his character and I found them more of an annoyance than anything else. It might be interesting if you’ve read the book, I suppose. Or if you’re a “see everything” Al Pacino fan. But other than that it didn’t do much for me.

Bardfilm and I have been discussing “modern adaptations” lately, and I asked for the distinction – did he mean modern setting but original text, or modern language?  For this particular context he meant the latter.  Since I don’t normally seek out such movies I went out and found one – the King Lear adaptation of the book of the same name, A Thousand Acres.

Jason Robards plays our Lear (“Larry”, as it becomes apparently quickly that the author’s gone with a whole first initial thing) to his daughters Michelle Pfeiffer (as “R”ose), Jessica Lange (as “G”inny) and Jennifer Jason Leigh (as “C”aroline).  From that point it’s harder to tell who is who because unless I’m missing something the first initial game goes out the window as Colin Firth’s Jess is plainly the bastard Edmund.  As you can see, though, the cast is first rate.

For any “modern adaptation” of this sort that’s clearly only taking inspiration from Shakespeare and not trying to tell his story, I look for a couple of things.  How much direct homage to Shakespeare is there?  How much of the original story remains?  How much new material does this story provide?

In other words does the end result produce something standalone, while still showing respect for the original?  It’s very tricky to strike a balance, because every time you diverge from the source material you’re going to have audience like me asking, “Oh, really? So you think you’re about to tell a better story?” and you need to bring it.  Safest not to change the story too much, but instead to bring new elements that Shakespeare never touched upon.

How does A Thousand Acres do?  It’s not bad.  The connection to the source material is clear, and  more than minimal.  Larry runs the farm, and wants to retire and divide it up amongst his three daughters.  R and G find this a great idea, but when C so much as says “Let me think about it” he disowns her on the spot.  I mentioned Jess as the bastard character who does all the bastard things, sleeping with the sisters, getting into a fight with his father (Pat Hingle as this sort of Kent/Gloucester combination character), but he’s not really the architect of all the bad that happens.  There’s even a nice big storm for the daughters to send their father into.

Other than those story elements the similarities are few and far between.  In this story, R and G (makes me think of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern when I say that :)) are actually the good guys, if you can believe it. It’s a very complicated story.  Nobody in town likes them because the people think the daughters conspired to steal the farm from their father.  Meanwhile the daughters have both got some deep dark secrets that reveal their father is not the nice man he seems, and is well deserving of their hate.

I found the story too confusing to follow in many parts, and that’s one of the reasons that I often dislike modern adaptations.  You try to add your own material, but then to really develop a foundation in that material you have to stray farther (further?) from the original, and eventually you hit walls where you can’t go more in any direction.  Same here.  There are some obvious places where R and G are talking and it seems like the most obvious thing in the world to do is for them to go talk to C…but they can’t.  That’s not how the story went.  In fact we never really even get C’s side of the story – this is Goneril’s movie, if I have to pick a central character.

The whole thing is additionally complicated with the addition of husbands and children, alcoholism and terminal illnesses.  There’s a whole lot going on in this movie besides the Shakespeare.  And it’s all set in this weird sort of Tennessee Williams sounding world where full grown women still call their parents “Mommy” and “Daddy” which, when coupled with the deep dark secrets that we learn, is all the more uncomfortable.

See it if you get a moment, if for nothing else than to have something to talk about the next time somebody trots out one of those lists that contains nothing but Lion King, Ten Things I Hate About You and She’s The Man. But don’t go out of your way for it.