Serpico

Originally published on 18/08/2023 on Letterboxd

Don’t know if there’s a more concise summation of how my tastes have evolved than the fact that I’m mostly lukewarm now towards a film I would’ve adored 3 or 4 years ago. Lumet’s commitment to what I can only call a kind of transcendental individualism, whereby an individual somehow always upends and manages to subvert (no matter the cost) the foundation of the institution they are working within/against, is something that I regard with a great deal more skepticism now, especially considering that Ellroy’s oft-derided genre fiction is so much more confrontational towards the inherent hypocrisy of the cop in 20th-century America than a film ostensibly based on real events. The intro mentioned that Lumet’s work often aligned with leftism, which seems like a terribly misguided and even naive assumption to make, especially considering how Serpico is very much a film that is less concerned with the irrevocable rot at the core of the NYPD than it is with the hagiography of the figure at its core, often approaching parodic degrees of veneration.

And yet- for all of Lumet’s journeyman instincts keeping this at bay from the kind of self-interrogation that the material demands, Pacino’s total embodiment of Serpico himself transcends the absence of formal ambition, to the point where his conscious commitment to increasingly unruly facial hair honestly makes a far more retributive argument than Lumet’s filmmaking.