DANNY COLLINS

When we first see the titular Danny Collins he is crooning out sub-standard songs to an audience of crazed elderly women (there’s a Rod Stewart joke in here somewhere). A posthumous letter from John Lennon (in response to a an interview he gave as a young musician) prompts him to revaluate his life Danny Collins is a film that certainly benefits from star power, Al Pacino injects equal parts wiry humour and emotional vulnerability into the central character lending to the film’s emotional weights. Of course it would be wrong to give Pacino all the credit in the performance department, Bobby Cannavale gives an emotional performance as Danny’s illegitimate son Tom, resentful of the father who has just waltzed back into his life and yet concealing a pain of his own. Annette Benning has very good chemistry with Pacino as Mary, the hotel manager, who feels an emotional connection with him. These performances work in the film’s favour to paper over some of the more clichéd elements of the plot. The ‘dissatisfied musician off to find new inspiration’ isn’t exactly a new one, nor is the ‘family he has been neglecting’. Danny Collin’s uses its characters effectively to give a familiar story some much needed emotional weight and give the audience more from a story that, in less capable hands, could definitely have been less. It also helps that the film’s abrupt ending (something I’m not usually a fan of) picks just the right time for the curtain call. One aside I would like to note is the speculation as to what kind of film we would have gotten if Steve Carrell, who was originally cast as Tom, had given. Before seeing his performance in Foxcatcher (2014) I would have said that the film had a lucky escape, but now I am forced to wonder what the film would have been like with Carrell. FINAL VERDICT 6/10 it might not hit all the right notes but it still manages to make a song and dance of it.