Sidney Lumet still revels in that gritty, Gotham feel of old.
How old Sidney Lumet?
Old Sidney Lumet, 81, fine, thank you very much.
Old Sidney Lumet so fine, in fact, that after nearly 60 years in the game of directing and producing (first job in 1948), he's got a new movie opening this week, in very much the Sidney Lumet tradition.
It's Find Me Guilty, classic Lumet in that it's fast, furiously driven by dialogue, full of bravura performances, set in a New York so real it makes your skin feel gritty, your nostrils fill with taxi toxins and your whole internal ecosystem readjust to the more jangly and confrontational rhythms of the Big Town.
Just like Prince of the City. Just like Dog Day Afternoon. Just like Serpico. Just like Network. Just like Q&A. Just like The Pawnbroker.
The new picture features Vin Diesel, part-Italian, in the Italian community, or the segment of that community known as the mob.
Diesel, in a hairpiece, 30 extra pounds on his frame, a baggy suit and a breakout performance (another Lumet tradition; he is great with actors, as proved by the 17 Oscars his actors have won), plays Jack 'Jackie Dee' DiNorscio, an uneducated, low-ranking mob soldier.
DiNorscio, during the longest organised-crime trial in history in the late 1980s, defended himself and tried to derail an ambitious prosecuting attorney's attempts, using racketeering statutes, to put 20 guys away. Much of the dialogue is derived from actual court records.
So for Lumet it's back almost to where he started, a room in a New York courthouse. His first film was the classic 12 Angry Men, about the tensions let loose in the confines of a jury room where issues of ethics and legality were argued with extremely real stakes. But it's also back to the milieu of professional law enforcement, New York-style, familiar from Serpico and Prince and Q&A and his A&E TV series 100 Centre Street. He's been here before.
His ninth decade on Earth finds the old guy acting surprisingly, er, young. You'd never guess 81; you'd guess 61, a vigorous 61, the kind of 61-year-old that still loves to mix it up, loves to tell stories, loves the past but can laugh about it and is full of hope for the future, for movies yet to be made, for actors yet to be directed ("I've never worked with Meryl Streep!''), for stories yet to be told.
He's dressed like a college kid, in jeans and a crew neck sweater over a button-down shirt, a big pair of sneakers on his feet. He's baldish, but has a thick spritz of gray steel wool at the margins, and he has a mogul's vast horn-rimmed glasses on, turning his eyes into movie screens themselves.
He looks like the world's best chess hustler or the beloved philosophy professor who's always in trouble for leading demonstrations against the war, any war, or maybe a cigar-smoking music critic who begins every sentence with, "I'll tell you a funny story,'' and then does. He's ebullient, voluble, charismatic, funny as hell and great fun.
He puts those feet up on the desk of his office, cradles the back of his huge head in his hands, leans back and remembers a passage through American popular culture quite unique.
It's not just a story of movies and stars and Oscars for others and successes, but of passions and feuds and mistakes, of vast sea changes to the audience's preferences, of men famous and not-so-famous.
Los Angeles Times-Washington Post
