Al Pacino set to Star in THE HUMBLING
Al Pacino is set to reteam with director Barry Levinson for a new film called The Humbling, which is based on a book by the same name written by Phillip Roth. The story centers on a character named Simon Axler played by Pacino, "a famous stage actor in decline who is revived when he retires to his upstate New York farmhouse and shacks up with a much younger woman." Levinson is currently on the hunt to cast the lead female character. It should be interested who they get, Pacino must be pretty excited to get some steamy screen time with a hot young actress.
The movie is scheduled to start shooting in the fall. Levinson recently finished a low budget horror film called The Bay, and after he is finished with this new film, he will start shooting Gotti: Three Generations, which Pacino will also have a role in.
Here's the description of the story from the book:
Everything is over for Simon Axler, the protagonist of Philip Roth s startling new book. One of the leading American stage actors of his generation, now in his sixties, he has lost his magic, his talent, and his assurance. His Falstaff and Peer Gynt and Vanya, all his great roles, "are melted into air, into thin air." When he goes onstage he feels like a lunatic and looks like an idiot. His confidence in his powers has drained away; he imagines people laughing at him; he can no longer pretend to be someone else. "Something fundamental has vanished." His wife has gone, his audience has left him, his agent can t persuade him to make a comeback.
Into this shattering account of inexplicable and terrifying self-evacuation bursts a counterplot of unusual erotic desire, a consolation for a bereft life so risky and aberrant that it points not toward comfort and gratification but to a yet darker and more shocking end. In this long days journey into night, told with Roths inimitable urgency, bravura, and gravity, all the ways that we convince ourselves of our solidity, all our lifes performances talent, love, sex, hope, energy, reputation are stripped off.
The Humbling is Roth s thirtieth book.