new to DVD: Danny Collins

Danny Collins is a movie that has a severely miscast actor in the lead role. Danny Collins is also a movie that benefits greatly from that miscasting.

Al Pacino stars as Danny Collins. When he was a young man in the early 70s, Danny was a naive but talented folk music singer/ songwriter on the cusp of greatness. One day while still relatively unknown, he gets a radio interview in which he is overwhelmed by the interviewer's enthusiasm. The d.j. calls Danny a genius, predicts fame and fortune for him, and compares his songwriting to that of Danny's own hero, John Lennon. Unbeknownst to Danny, Lennon actually listens to the broadcast, and writes him a letter. Unfortunately, Lennon writes the letter to Danny care of the radio station, and the letter never gets to Danny.*

44 years later, Danny's best friend and manager, Frank Grubman (Christopher Plummer) discovers the letter and presents it to Danny as a birthday present. Danny's reaction is far beyond anything Frank could have imagined. In the decades since that naive young man sat in that tiny little radio station, Danny has become a major celebrity. He has long ago completely abandoned the folk roots and songwriting that were once the cornerstones of his career, and has instead coasted on covering highly accessible pop songs written for him by studio staff writers. His biggest hit, "Hey, Baby Doll" is fun in the sense that it's catchy, but its lyrics are insipid, and the tune is so vocally undemanding that . . . well, that even Al Pacino can sing it pretty well.

But the discovery of the Lennon letter inspires Danny to change his life around. He cancels a lucrative upcoming tour to focus on getting back to songwriting. He moves out of his postmodern mansion in Hollywood to a standard Hilton suite in New Jersey. And the choice of locations is not insignificant; Danny's adult son, whom he has never even met, lives a blue-collar life in Jersey.

And here we get to the heart of the story. Danny's celebrity is a subplot. His music career is a subplot. The potential romance he develops with the hotel manager (Annette Bening at her most charming) is a subplot. The real story is about Danny trying to become a father figure to his angry son and the son's family.

A word about the performances: Al Pacino plays Al Pacino. Face it, it's been decades since he's done anything else. Pacino doesn't do character work. He shows up, blusters about (he's the only actor I know who can seem blustery even in his quieter moments), and never lets us forget that "hey there, you're watching Al fucking Pacino, so watch out!" I don't mean any of this as a complaint, just an observation, because the truth is, Pacino sticks so closely to his screen persona because, quite simply, it works. He makes bad scenes good and good scenes great through sheer charisma.

All of this explains my comment at the beginning of this review. Pacino, who can't carry a note, is the perfectly wrong actor to cast as a singing superstar. But he's so damn fun in the role that I rarely cared while watching the movie. In fact, the very fact that Pacino can't sing worth a damn may be an assett to the characterization; Danny is supposed to have a long list of hit songs, but the only one we hear is "Baby Doll," which, like so many pop songs, is somehow bad and good at the same time and doesn't require any talent to perform. You know what I mean. How many songs currently on the pop charts require Sinatra-level talent, am I right?

In their supporting roles, Bening and Plummer are equally good. But because Pacino tends to overwhelm the screen with his over-the-top performances, the real stand-outs in this cast will be overlooked by most: Bobby Cannavale and Jennifer Garner as Danny's son and daughter-in-law.

For someone still relatively young, Cannavale has played a wide variety of roles, but here he is 100% completely believable as an average guy. He is angered by Danny's lifelong absence and sudden appearance, unimpressed with his father's celebrity, and thoroughly convincing as a loving father and husband with working-class weights on his shoulders. Garner, meanwhile, is charming as Samantha, who is so right when she says that she's "the perfect daughter-in-law" that the comment doesn't even come across as arrogant.

This highly capable cast is aided in no small way by Dan Fogelman's script, who makes every character, from Pacino's larger-than-life superstar, to Cannavale's regular working Joe equally, thoroughly believable. One thing I loved about Fogelman's script is that it tends to set up cliched situations and then turn them on their heads in ways that are completely unexpected, but yet somehow feel just right, and not at all like "gotcha" twists.

This is a very good movie.

*Just a side-note, I've got to nitpick at Matt Zoller Seitz, a critic I generally admire, who makes an extremely stupid mistake in his review of this film, getting the details all wrong in the "letter from Lennon" back-story. It's odd, considering how clearly and explicitly Frank explains the letter's origin in the movie, how Zoller Seitz could have gotten the story so wrong. It wouldn't be worth mentioning save for the fact that Zoller Seitz's examination of the movie, and of the Frank character, finds significance in the back-story that the critic so completely misunderstands.