People I Know was one of the handful of films set in New York that had the World Trade Center towers edited out in the days following 9/11. But the many cuts have given the melancholy thriller a rather surreal zing.
The tale is also fixed in time by its reference to Mayor Giuliani's millennium Clean Up New York campaign, implying that behind his fixation with sleek streets and shiny avenues hid a deep disdain for the city's real problems of immigration. It is perhaps the only anti-Giuliani film you'll ever see.
Al Pacino plays the loser-hero, Eli Wurman, a once-renowned publicist at the end of his career, who dreams of his days of 1960s political activism. But this is the last 24 hours of his life, and we follow him from meeting to meeting, via his pill-pushing doctor and the death of an outofcontrol actress (Téa Leone).
The film seems to long for a different-New York - for the NYC of 30 years ago, where people in flip-flops dropped their litter on the stinky and complex sidewalks. For a time before everyone fell in love with Sex and the City chic, steel furnishings and sober laughter rising in smokeless bars full of women who have been waxed to within an inch of their lives.
Pacino's Wurman winces at the difference. For the first time in ages, Pacino isn't shouting. His voice is cigarette-mucky, musical. He listens, then cajoles (his doctor, his clients, his assistant, his sister-in-law). His character doesn't have a mobile phone and so we see him standing in call boxes on the street and it is an overwhelmingly nostalgic image: Pacino with crazy hair and a gravepale face, holding a telephone to his mouth on a New York street, inside clothes that seem too big and heavy for him. He is so concentrated, so compact. He sucks all the light out of the frame.
He is the reason to see the film, and seeing him like this fills you with pleasure - and panic. Pleasure because it's lovely to see him redeeming his talent, and panic because you never want him to leave us. The panic mounts when his character becomes increasingly sad and hopeless, and drugged.
He looks out of the window of his cab on Fifth Avenue, at the washeddown concrete and perfect shops, and it is as though he is looking at a Sunday dinner that is spoiled. Then he gives a little moaning noise and checks his pockets for what might be a toothpick to remove the traces of New York from his mouth. You want to watch for ever; you want to walk right into the screen and put your head on his shoulder.
People I Know
Cert: cert15
