There’s this speech that Al Pacino gives in The Devil’s Advocate, a campy, Faustian, thriller-slash-satire from the mid-90s. In the film, Pacino plays a sleazy corporate lawyer who also happens to be The Prince of Darkness himself and Keanu Reeves, his rising-star protégé. Pacino explains to Reeves why he—standing at five foot six, with tobacco-stained teeth and looking undeniably worse for wear—possesses a power his matinee-idol apprentice never will.
“Look at me,” he smirks. “I’ve been underestimated from day one. Do I look like a master of the universe? I’m a surprise. They never see me coming.”
After reading Pacino’s new memoir, Sonny Boy, I started to wonder if the same could be said of Pacino himself—if this is both his blessing and his curse. Over the course of 384 pages, we see a man who has reached unimaginable artistic heights, yet never quite received his full due; an artist who has been incredibly visible for the past half century, but whose most personal work continues to go largely unknown and unappreciated.
I should admit that I’m a Pacino superfan. After having something akin to a religious awakening watching Dog Day Afternoon, I burned through his movies and devoured every interview that I could find. By the time Sonny Boy was announced, I was intimately familiar with his persona, his oeuvre, everything. So that put me in a unique position to bring a critical eye to this memoir—of all people, I would know the difference between a warmed over talk show bit and a real revelation.
Overall, Sonny Boy offers a wonderfully accurate, if impressionistic, portrait of the man. It fully captures Pacino’s strengths and weaknesses, and illuminates how they are often two sides of the same coin. This duality is perhaps best represented by his humility—a rare quality in a star of his stature. Pacino isn’t just disinterested in self-mythologizing or self-aggrandizing; he seems incapable of it. Sonny Boy gives us a plausible reason why: most likely, the recurring pattern of loss and disappointment that ran like a river through his life, adding an existential counterpoint to all of his successes. Yet his art was the thing that always allowed him, compelled him, to keep going. This is a man who experienced some of the highest highs and lowest lows that a human being can endure. You get the sense that he now just hopes the center will hold.
The contrasts of Pacino’s life started young. He grew up with an absent father and a loving but mentally unwell mother, yet he remembers his childhood as “golden,” filled with carefree days running through the streets of the Bronx with a group of troublemakers who antagonized the neighborhood. He then locked into his passion for acting, and when Pacino writes about the craft, you truly believe stardom was never the goal—in fact, there was no goal, only survival. I really loved the deeply spiritual way he describes acting. He speaks of an energy, of a channeling, of a knowing that he’d be successful—not because of ego or ambition, but because he’d aligned with this powerful thing inside of him:
“And then, one night, onstage, just like that, it happened. The power of expression was revealed to me … I became a part of something larger. I found there was more to me, a feeling that I belonged to a whole world and not just to one place … I knew I didn’t have to worry after that. I eat, I don’t eat. I make money, I don’t make money. I’m famous, I’m not famous. It didn’t mean anything anymore. And that’s lucky, in this business, when you don’t care about that. A door was opening, not to a career, not to success or fortune, but to the living spirit of energy. I had been given this insight into myself, and there was nothing else I could do but say: I want to do this forever.”
Tragedy struck in his early 20s when he lost his mother and grandfather in the same year, almost a decade before his first Tony Award and his breakout role as Michael Corleone in The Godfather. His childhood friends, one by one, died of drug overdoses. He uses the memoir to process this tragedy, and even after so many years, there’s still a distinct sense of: why me? Why did I not only survive, but go on to reach these heights I didn’t even aspire to?
Amidst these losses, life kept placing the right mentors and opportunities in his path, and by 31, Pacino was a bona fide movie star. In a span of just four years, he starred in The Godfather I and II, Serpico, and Dog Day Afternoon, earning Oscar nods for reach. But he won none—in part because he refused to play the publicity game, overwhelmed by sudden fame. (He writes that he was “psychologically incapable” of attending his first Oscars; his second, he was high on Valium). And the filming of The Godfather itself was incredibly fraught, because the studio vehemently did not want him for the lead role.
Pacino struggled greatly to adjust to this new way of living: at once the toast of the town and yet completely lost, sought after but under appreciated. “Do I deserve this great gift of celebrity that’s been given to me?” he writes. “Where is the acceptance in all of this? How do you live with the feeling that you don’t fit in with other people when you already feel like you don’t fit in with yourself? That’s a tough one to sort out.” During this time, he was also drinking heavily, until a mentor intervened and helped him to quit.
In the 1980s, a newly sober Pacino struggled to find roles of a similar quality to Michael Corleone and Sonny Wortzik. Despite this he still had cachet, and began to feel empowered to explore his own ideas and creative abilities. Scarface was his brainchild, a passion project sparked by a screening of the original 1932 film. He developed it with the best collaborators in the game, and delivered a bravura, transformative performance he still considers his finest. Critics, however, hated it. To make matters worse, Pacino recalls his peers twisting the knife: “For weeks, some of the biggest directors—even Lumet—harangued me about how bad it was.”
He returned to theater, and started investing his own money into projects that excited him. Around this time, a friend quipped, “What are you doing, Al? You’re becoming an off-off-Broadway movie star. That’s an oxymoron.” As if that were a bad thing.
This disconnect became even more clear—and painful—when Pacino directed his own film, Looking For Richard. An ambitious marriage of documentary and fiction featuring actors like Winona Ryder, Alec Baldwin, James Earl Jones, and Kenneth Branaugh. The film would be both a reenactment of Richard III—which Pacino had performed several times onstage—and a behind-the-scenes look at the rehearsal process. It was filmed over several years in the early 90s, while Pacino starred in movies such as Carlito’s Way, Dick Tracy, Heat, and Scent of a Woman (for which he won his first and only Oscar). It’s telling that Pacino is far more excited to recount the making of Looking For Richard than any of these acclaimed films. And Richard is, in my opinion, a great accomplishment: intelligent, artful yet unpretentious, educational, and very funny.
“I was never happier,” he writes. “I had fulfilled a personal vision. And when it was done, after four years of full immersion, we had to sell it.” So when it failed—in part because Pacino had no head for business, strategy, or self-promotion—”it wasn’t just a disappointment, it was a life-affecting thing.” In a melancholy anecdote, he recalls a dinner party in the Hollywood Hills where he realized that not a single person had heard of Richard. And you really do feel for the guy, caught once again in the paradox of being both so visible and so deeply unseen.
Pacino ultimately surrendered to what he perceived as his “failures”—or rather, the willful misunderstanding of his artistic ambitions by audiences, the industry, and even his peers—with resignation, rather than bitterness. “I’ve come to realize that when I do my own things, nobody goes,” he reflects. “Those avant-garde influences that I was brought up with never left my brain. When I’m left on my own, that’s just what seems to come out. It’s a drawback. People come in with expectations, and they leave angry.”
A defining aspect of the book is how quick and willing Pacino is to inventory his shortcomings, or to admit when he’s out of his depth. Sonny Boy makes it clear that if left to his own devices, Pacino might have missed out on the majority of opportunities that made him a star. In many ways, he succeeded in spite of himself. Elizabeth Taylor once quipped, “That boy needs all the help he can get,” while ex-girlfriend Diane Keaton once affectionately called him an “idiot savant.”
But Pacino himself deserves credit for his successes and his big swings. And that’s where he falters; his tendency towards self-deprecation can verge on self-sabotage, both in life and in the text. This can even be seen in Sonny Boy‘s prose, which flows in a conversational, stream-of-consciousness style that can feel too casual, even unpolished. It’s almost as if Pacino was so determined to avoid sounding pretentious or self-important that he overcorrected. Which is a shame, because it might be part of the reason this memoir didn’t make a bigger splash: to date, Sonny Boy has not cracked the number one spot on the NYT Bestseller List, bested by the memoirs of Ina Garten, Melania Trump, and RuPaul, among others.
But maybe this is a feature, and not a bug; maybe this really tells us more about the man and his character than an explicit confessional ever could.
As with his other, lesser known works, readers who stick with Pacino and adapt to his idiosyncratic style will be rewarded. He fills the pages with sharp self-awareness, wisdom, and spiritual musings—all filtered through his sweet, slightly screwy worldview. It’s thought-provoking and quietly devastating, especially in the later chapters, where he notes that the memoir is the first opportunity he’s had to eulogize his fallen friends from the Bronx. He contemplates that, as a new father again at age 84, he won’t be around for most of his newborn son’s life. He wonders, heartbreakingly, that if he had become successful just a few years earlier, his mother would have lived longer. The final line in the book reads: “Hey, Ma, see what happened to me?”
Because of his disarmingly folksy tone and compulsively self-effacing humor, it takes a minute to fully register the emotional wallop this book packs. Only after a beat do you appreciate the poetry and humanity of the work, and what an accomplishment the memoir really is. After all this time, we don’t always see old Al coming.