Author! Author!

Author! Author!

Al Pacino is a playwright in “Author! Author!” His play is opening on Broadway in a few weeks, but it needs a better second act. Unfortunately, Pacino has a domestic crisis on his hands. His wife is bored and wants to leave, he’s having an affair with the leading lady who doesn’t like being tied down by his kids You know how it goes. So every now and then, between fights with his wife and promises to his girlfriend, Pacino finds time to sit down at the typewriter and write that second act.

And as he does so, we come face-to-face with one of this movie’s major problems: Is this really about a playwright? Or is “playwright” just the title they gave this character because if they’d given him different tools from the prop department he could just as easily have been anything else? The movie clearly takes option two. That’s why we never learn what the play’s about or what the trouble is with Act Two or how Pacino hopes to fix it; we’re just supposed to fall for the old Dodge where the harried but brilliant author pounds away at his typewriter in between fights with his wife and promises to his girlfriend.

That unwillingness to be about its characters is fatal to “Author! Author!” Here’s a movie filled with references to New York and its various glamorous lifestyles (there are references to Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller, Elaine’s restaurant, etc.), but its inspiration comes out of TV sitcoms about rambunctious families and if it has a cinematic predecessor I’d bet it’s “Yours, Mine and Ours,” that superior 1968 comedy starring Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda.

“Author! Author!” can’t even establish a consistent attitude toward its characters. It veers uneasily between slapstick and pathos; between heart-rending family conferences like Tuesday Weld’s needs whatever they are and a ridiculous final scene that has Al Pacino and his kids barricaded on the roof of their townhouse while the cops stand in the street shouting ultimatums lifted from old Pat O’Brien movies.

The movie stars Pacino as the playwright, a lovable family man who is raising one kid from his first marriage and one from his current marriage to Tuesday Weld. All of the other neighborhood kids also spend a lot of time at Pacino’s house, because he’s such a lovable guy. But then Weld leaves (she doesn’t believe in staying married to the same man for long), and Pacino starts an affair with the star of his new play, Dyan Cannon.

Some of this material is handled as realism, some as farce. The Broadway theatrical details are handled as broad comedy (especially in the scenes starring my heroes Bob and Ray, who are brought on like a vaudeville team), but this movie is much too small to include Bob and Ray performing without costumes or sets for what seems like five minutes, or Tuesday Weld delivering a long speech about her needs whatever they are.

What’s he doing in this mess? What’s going on with his career? There was a moment, after “The Godfather: Part II,” when he and Robert De Niro seemed like the leading lights of their movie generation. But De Niro has gone from strength to strength, finding one good or great role after another; Pacino has made “Bobby Deerfield” and “Cruising” and “and Justice for All” and this. It’s funny that while De Niro’s hard pictures have made money, so few of Pacino’s would-be commercial projects have done well.

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