COMMENTARY, THE MOVIE

Al Pacino? Yes, it’s true: When Al Pacino was eighteen, he worked as an office boy at Commentary magazine. (For worried media ethicists I make the obligatory full disclosure: My father was editor of Commentary for a long time. I will receive no compensation, either in the form of speaking fees or Hanukkah gelt, for mentioning Commentary in this article. Now go jump in the lake.) Thirty-nine years, three Godfathers, and one Oscar later, Pacino the office boy is playing Mephistopheles in the new box-office hit The Devil’s Advocate. And judging by his rip-roaring performance in this rip-roaring melodrama, Pacino is one happy actor.

This is as unexpected a historical development as the fall of the Berlin Wall. Pacino is the last of the great Method actors: the New York stage performers — most prominently, Marlon Brando — who were taught by Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler and took Hollywood by storm in the 1950s. And for all their talent, they’ve spent the last forty years handing everybody in America a gigantic pain.

Method actors conduct themselves as though acting and torture were basically the same thing. But then, who could blame them? The philosophy of Method acting is nothing short of horrific: Dredge up the most horrible memories of your life, bring them to the surface, and relive them again and again and again. Only this way can your acting be honest, open, naked, raw. No wonder they all seemed so glum. Laurence Olivier, after watching Dustin Hoffman keep himself awake for days in order to look exhausted in the film Marathon Man, asked the young American phenom why he didn’t just try acting.

Rather like the New York intellectual world, the Method was imported to America from Europe, and the two share more than just the career of Al Pacino. Method actors hate other actors; New York intellectuals hate other intellectuals. Method actors spend years avoiding the stage and screen because their trade is just too painful; New York intellectuals get writer’s block. The only difference is that New York intellectuals are grappling with the most fundamental problems of human existence while Method actors are basically exhibitionists who change clothes and accents and makeup to entertain other people.

After the age of thirty-two, Al Pacino had nothing more to prove, really; he was thirty-two when he played Michael Corleone in The Godfather, which is, I believe, the greatest of all screen performances. But after spending most of the 1980s in a sour funk, and starring in some really horrible movies (remember Revolution?), Pacino seems to have had a revelation liberating him from Method torment: He became an entertainer, which is what actors really are.

Pacino came to life again on the screen at the beginning of this decade playing a comic-strip villain in the otherwise disappointing Dick Tracy. He did a glorious turn as the world’s greatest flim-flam salesman in Glengarry Glen Ross. But his breakthrough came with the Oscar-winning role of a blind retired colonel on a wild outing in Scent of a Woman. This was such a flamboyant performance that it has become fashionable to deride it for its hamminess, but such derision does Pacino an injustice. His work in Scent of a Woman is truly great. No one has ever captured highs and lows as Pacino does: All you need to do is watch the way he shows his character’s abrupt and painful descent into suicidal depression after an exciting and memorable few days.

Of course, he can take the hamminess too far, as he did in the endless Heat, for example, where he played an emotional foulmouth who would suddenly STARTS SCREAMING AT THE TOP OF HIS &!*% LUNGS in an apparent effort to BURST YOUR &!*% EARDRUMS. But for the most part, it’s a pleasure to watch someone as ferociously gifted as Pacino let himself loose. He’s limber, amusing, and so exuberant he seems ready to jump off the screen, land in your lap, and give you a big hug. And he’s so good an actor that he elevates the people around him.

In The Devil’s Advocate, Pacino’s Devil is named John Milton, and he is much like the Satan in the original Milton’s Paradise Lost: You just love it when he’s around. He has a great office, a really weird apartment, women go wild for him, and he knows many secrets. Pacino is not actually the main character in The Devil’s Advocate; its protagonist is played by Keanu Reeves. One of the unexpected delights of this sensationally enjoyable movie is that Reeves manages to hold his own against Pacino. Reeves has excelled at playing good-natured and inarticulate boys, in Parenthood, for example, and the Bill and Ted movies. But he has been hopeless, until now, at speaking two lines straight. Here Reeves plays a smooth-talking defense lawyer who has never lost a case, and he manages to get across his character’s intelligence, his arrogance, and his way with words. In an overwrought and immensely fun climactic scene, Reeves goes head to head with Pacino in a debate about the meaning of it all. It is testimony to Pacino’s greatness that Reeves can’t win by argument, only by action.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 8. From good acting to bad: On the Upper West Side of Manhattan, once the red-hot center of the opposition to the Vietnam war and a place where guns are subject to a hatred only slightly less virulent than Clarence Thomas, I am packed in like a sardine to see the most mindlessly violent war movie ever made. It’s called Starship Troopers, and it’s set off in the future, as the Earth battles bugs from outer space. We spend two hours in the company of a cast of good-looking nobodies who can’t even speak a line like “Kill them all!” without sounding as though they’re reading off a cue card.

The computer-graphic bugs are frightening and gross, and the movie is as fast-paced as a bullet train, but it’s really appalling — casually vicious, worshipful of mindless regimentation, and depersonalized. Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post finds all this very alarming; he calls Starship Troopers a “post-Nazi epic,” with Earth playing the fascist planet.

Hunter’s on to something, but not what he thinks. The Upper West Side audience laughs knowingly throughout the movie because it implicitly understands what Hunter doesn’t: The Nazi stuff is a postmodern putdown of the 1959 Robert A. Heinlein novel on which the movie is based.

Heinlein was right-wing when right-wing wasn’t cool: He took Milton Friedman’s admonition that “there’s no such thing as a free lunch” and turned it into a socialist dystopia in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Conservative think tanks around the nation are filled with people whose first exposure to libertarian ideas came from an adolescent reading of Heinlein.

Starship Troopers is Heinlein playing a neoconservative: He tells the story of an Earth that takes the benefits of liberty so much for granted that most people are perfectly happy to give up the vote rather than do the turn in the armed forces necessary for full citizenship. The threat in Starship Troopers is a literally faceless, mindless, collectivist alien society bent on universal domination because that is what its genes have encoded it to do. And the war against them is dangerous, bloody, and frightening; as high-tech as you can imagine, but as gruesome as the Battle of the Bulge or Hamburger Hill. There is a cost to defending a free society against a collectivist threat.

This is not your average movie fare, and so it should come as no surprise that Hollywood has twisted Heinlein’s novel into a mock Nazi pretzel. The director of Starship Troopers, Paul Verhoeven, is an intelligent man with all the gifts to be a magnificent filmmaker. Twenty years ago, in his native Holland, he made a great World War II movie called Soldier of Orange. But he is also amazingly perverse: His idea of a morality tale isn’t Starship Troopers but Showgirls, his pornographic study of Las Vegas lapdancers. It’s clear Verhoeven purposely cast bad actors and purposely added the Nazi frills to show his disapproval of the novel he spent $ 100 million bringing to the screen.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 14. Hollywood’s perversities continue: While Starship Troopers says that only Nazis fight socialists, a cartoon for children turns out to be the most anti-Communist movie ever made. The cartoon is Anastasia, and not since Disney set the Hunchback of Notre Dame to singing in a high tenor about his love for Paris has there been so unpromising a subject for animation.

Anastasia was the young daughter of Czar Nicholas and his wife Alexandra; with her parents and four brothers and sisters, she was brutally killed by the Bolsheviks at Ekaterinberg during the Russian Revolution. Ten years later, a woman claiming to be Anastasia surfaced in Paris; after some confusion (and a movie starring Ingrid Bergman), we now know definitively that it was a hoax.

What could Twentieth Century Fox have been thinking to choose this story as its opening salvo in a battle against Disney’s dominance of the cartoon business? Whatever it was, they should continue to think it, because Anastasia is wonderful. It’s beautiful to look at and well paced by directors Don Bluth and Gary Goldman. It benefits from a witty script, sensational voice work by Meg Ryan, John Cusack, and Kelsey Grammer, and a character named Bartok the Bat (given hilarious voice by Hank Azaria) that may be the single most adorable critter ever to appear in a cartoon. (Second obligatory disclosure: Twentieth Century Fox is owned by News Corporation, which owns THE WEEKLY STANDARD as well as the New York Post, my current employer. Now drop dead.)

But even more fascinating than the quality of Anastasia may be the fact that its anti-Communist politics rival Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s. This is the first piece of popular culture I’ve seen that challenges the validity of the Russian Revolution itself.

Though it uses the names of real people and has a real-world setting, Anastasia begins in a fantasy world of Czarist enchantment: balls, general gaiety, and a happy populace. Then the evil Rasputin comes and casts a magical curse on the Romanov family. His curse stirs up discontent in the Russian people, and they revolt; in the world according to Anastasia, the October revolution was solely the result of an evil spell.

Flash forward ten years, and (in one of the many terrific numbers by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty) “there’s a rumor in St. Petersburg” that the princess Anastasia survived the revolution. The populace has long since awakened from Rasputin’s spell to find their lives “grim,” “bleak,” and ” depressing.” One character spits out the word “comrade” as though it is a curse in itself. If Anastasia succeeds, it will mean that at last, eighty years after the civil war that followed the Russian Revolution, the Whites have defeated the Reds in the battle for the hearts and minds of the world’s children.

At the end of the movie, Anastasia renounces her title to live as a commoner with her true love, Dimitri. Maybe she should move to America. She can always get Al Pacino’s job at Commentary.

A contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, John Podhoretz is editor of the NEW YORK POST’s editorial pages.