Earnest, doe eyed Pacino makes a remarkable turn as an honest cop trying to do his job right in the corrupt corridors of the NY police department. As Frank Serpico, trouble for him starts from the day he joins - ordering food at the local cafe is a routine process, you go and pick up your tray, but Serpico asks for something different to be served. He is not liked. He is seen as an outsider and he does very little to get along. His methods are unorthodox - when a call comes in for a possible rape, his partner ignores it because its not their 'sector' (they are patrolling at night). Serpico applies reason and sense of what is just. When one of the rapists is later being taken away to be locked up, he has coffee with him to convince him to give away his buddies. No good cop, bad cop routine here, just one man's feeling of morality and obligation.
No one around him sees the world this way, and a touching scene in Italian, with his mother, clues us in into why Serpico might be the way that he is. The film goes deeper than what I have described, especially once Serpico becomes an undercover, plainclothes policeman and stops shaving or cutting his hair. He looks like a bum because to him thats the only way to fit in with the crooked underbelly of the city. Everyone around him is content taking bribes and putting their money into a pot for the future. Serpico's honest ways make him the pariah. This may make the film seem preachy or holier than thou, but the narrative is pure police procedural and it is anchored by the the deeply intense, implosive performance by Pacino, ferocious and scared, sometimes at the same time in an act of great dichotomy and in what must be his best work outside of the
Godfather films and
Dog Day Afternoon (another Sidney Lumet classic). Lumet was of course at his prime when he made this - going on to make that film two years later with Pacino and then a year after that, what is widely considered his best work,
Network.
Rating: 4.5/5
