In this film, actor Simon Axler (Al Pacino) faces a different path through his struggle to find his passion for life over time. Near the point of collapse, Simon finds a lively man, Pegeen Stapleford (Greta Gerwig), but things are still going on in a different turn during that relationship. Now, Simon has a hard time keeping up with the young Pegeen who coexists with things.
Pacino gives a refreshingly quiet and understated performance with poignant moments of vulnerability. It is the most consistent factor in a film that is frustratingly inconsistent.
This is really two stories: one about an old guy trying to prove he's still got it sexually speaking, and the other about an artist losing a grip on his craft. The latter plot point is decent. The former? Yuck.
In the end, 'The Humbling' is one of those movies where the "plot" is far less interesting than what the movie is "about" - and in this case, it's about acting in general and Al Pacino in particular.
It's a mopey, silly situation, whose only tension comes from our perpetual fear that Levinson is about to make us watch a somber drama copulating with a farce.
If you liked Birdman, you also might like seeing Al Pacino playing a delusional, indeed hallucinatory, actor trying to save his soul and his onstage career in the sort-of-comedy The Humbling. Or you might not.
A messy movie but also a thrilling one, grappling with diminished talents and vanishing virility in brutally honest ways that show up the similarly-themed Birdman as a cheap parlor trick.
This is Pacino's best film performance in years. In playing an actor who has lost the art of fooling himself, he reveals with mordant wit the terrors of diminished capacity. To watch him do it is a master class.