SCARECROW

SCARECROW
Director: Jerry Schatzberg
Starring: Gene Hackman, Al Pacino, Eileen Brennan’s naked, heaving bosom
Year: 1973

Bumper: Ryan Wilson

Road movies are tricky animals.  Inherent is the ideal that the journey will not only change the characters, but also the audience.  You will move from this place to that.  You will walk away wiser, better traveled, a few more miles on the engine, sure, but they’re good miles.  Highway miles.  You take it with you, drive with it in the backseat, hear the music in your head on the pillow.  The road movie is a big honking responsibility.  The feckless, trite journey can stick in the craw for days.  Rage and hate may bubble up at the filmmakers and actors who’ve subjected you to their visionary pilgrimage. 

Enter Scarecrow.  If the road calls, let vintage Hackman and Pacino be your guides.  To see these two guys together looking so young, before Pacino became a caricature of himself, is worth the bump alone.  But they enter into rarified air on the screen together.  You might find the movie uneven, but I’ll be damned if you can say these two men don’t display a genuine, aorta busting love on screen. 

With a nod to The Idiot, perhaps, Pacino crafts that oft attempted but seldom mastered character that exhibits the wisdom of the Buddha-Christ without the maddening condescension of looking into the camera, pausing, winking, then whispering in your ear, “I’m pretending to be a simpleton but really I am all-knowing and teaching you how to live peacefully with love in your heart every day for the rest of your life so that you may pass on your love and begin a chain of love and healing that will save our species from self destruction.”  Pacino's Francis Lionel is the real deal.  Okay, so maybe the scarecrow allegory is stretched a little thin (you’ll see); but if you just surrender, just a little, you might just need to crack open that travel pack of Kleenex. 

Is there anyone, anyone at all, who looks at a woman the way Gene Hackman does, searching her face like he might find his keys or his lost soul?  You don’t need to answer that.