Netflixing: Scent of a Woman

It’s entirely pos­si­ble that I’ve seen this film before, but it’s also pos­si­ble that I never swal­lowed it down all in one sit­ting. I’ll be brief:

There is only one thing not to love about Martin Brest’s Scent of a Woman: the very seri­ous hunk of jarls­berg that must be downed while watch­ing it. Certainly, the film reeks of early 1990s over­writ­ten performance-vehicle sen­ti­men­tal pieces of cheese whiz. But that goes down much bet­ter if you take it with a grain of salt.

Al Pacino, obvi­ously, offers up an amaz­ing per­for­mance as the blind and aging Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade. There are obvi­ous rea­sons why the per­for­mance is mem­o­rable (hell, the guy hardly blinks on cam­era) but the real meat of it comes out dur­ing the smaller moments, like his near col­lapse on Park Avenue or his first inter­view of the young Charlie Simms, sit­ting, lec­tur­ing from an obfus­cated arm­chair. We are as blind to his exis­tence as ours is to him.

Speaking of Charlie Simms, Chris O’Donnell is charm­ing as the impres­sion­able young bump­kin. Neither a starry eyed fish out of water nor an farm­boy who is too dumb to func­tion, Mr. O’Donnell slips into the role of a con­fused 17 year old per­fectly. He pro­vides the per­fect look­ing glass through which to see Lt. Slade’s wild trip through his psyche.

Cinematography is sim­ple and clas­sic: heavy on the warm tones, a gen­er­ally flat palette with a nice use of haze on wider shots. There is a rather odd wide angle used at the end just fit all those refor­ma­tory boys onto the screen. Editing is bet­ter than we think. There is a great deal of talk­ing in this film, and at over 150 min­utes the pace between the cuts must keep our atten­tion dur­ing everyone’s diatribes.

Also of note: Philip Seymour Hoffman as the smarmy George Willis. With only lim­ited screen time, the young Mr. Hoffman man­ages to spin out a great lit­tle char­ac­ter. Watching him try to manip­u­late the school’s dis­ci­pli­nary com­mit­tee while his father breathes down on him is really some­thing to behold. Bradley Whitford also offers up his weasley best mid­way through.

Great? Nah. Watch it? When it comes on TV, check it out.