David Gordon Green‘s Manglehorn, an Al Pacino flick about an aging ex-con living in Austin, will play Telluride and Toronto, I’m hearing. Holly Hunter, Harmony Korine and Chris Messina costar. Mangelhorn wasn’t on my radar until now. Mainly because I wasn’t sure if I wanted it on my radar. Partly because I don’t know who Green is any more. Well, I guess I know. He’s the guy who began as a young Terrence Malick and then gradually shifted into comedies only to shift back again into a kind of quirky indie mode — a guy who will make any kind of smallish movie about any kind of headstrong loser he can find.
That and he likes to shoot ’em fast and crank ’em out like sausage. Right before Manglehorn Green directed Prince Avalanche and Joe, and also produced Land Ho!
Boilerplate: “AJ Manglehorn (Pacino) is an aging, ordinary guy in a small town. He nurses his sick cat, squeezes out a conversation with the local bank teller every Friday, and eats at the same place every day. But there is more to Manglehorn than meets the eye: he’s an ex-con who, 40 years ago, gave up the woman of his dreams for a big ‘job’. He now obsesses daily over the choices he made. After a dramatic effort to start over, Manglehorn faces a terrifying moment and is unmasked as a guy with a very, very dark past. “