Serpico

Directed by Sidney Lumet. Written by Peter Maas (book), Waldo Salt (screenplay) and Norman Wexler (screenplay). Starring Al Pacino (Frank Serpico), John Randolph (Chief Sidney Green), Jack Kehoe (Tom Keough).

Bottom line: Pacino is perfect. It is a great, cop/crime film in every way.
4/4

Serpico opens to bold, white title credits on a black background with a soundtrack consisting of a police siren. The first image we see is a bearded, bloody Frank Serpico (Pacino) sitting in the back of police car. He has been shot.

The preceding sequence jumps between the dark, rainy, cold hospital and Serpico's bright happy graduation.

On his first day on the streets, with the 'Patrol Officer of the Month', they go to the lunch break at a local deli. Serpico and his partner get a free lunch because, in the words of the veteran officer, 'We give him a break on double parking during deliveries...so you kinda take what he gives you.'

It isn't really greed or maliciousness but apathy and complacency that come to define Serpico's world. As one cop puts it," I once tried to pull out and they were all over me...you just go along".

At every turn there seems to be another level of corruption: the one officer beats a criminal to a pulp in a failed attempt to get a confession, the senior officers take credit for Serpico's arrest, one sleeps on the job instead of investigating a potential rape because it is in the other district (albeit on a boarder street).

The brilliance of this movie comes in its execution. The great 70's cop movies, like The French Connection, hit the mark in making a gritty and realistic atmosphere. You don't need shaky cameras and diegetic sound to make a reality feel, just a cool headedness about what to hear and see and when; silence with a still camera can be just a successful in making suspense that some sharp violins. Serpico strikes a balance between making decisions for the sake of realism and for the cinematic effect. It doesn't lose sight of the fact that it is a movie.

The success of the story wouldn't have been possible without Pacino’s performance. In a number of his roles, as I have noticed over the years, he plays an odd ball very well. As Serpico, he is an honest cop whose honesty comes across as naivety. He walks with a goofy, bouncy stride which, I'd like to note, transitions smoothly and gracefully into a tired, frustrated trot after years of disappointment. He is the kind of awkward that makes you slightly uncomfortable; it isn’t that he is doing anything wrong by striking some ballet poses in the office but it is just a little weird. Serpico's honesty is consistent and natural. It just never occurs to him to accept bribe money or take advantage of his position. In doing this so naturally, Serpico becomes a character to whom it is somewhat difficult to relate.

For the past week, I have been reading Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi. She discusses the significance of fiction literature. Really good fiction doesn’t just transport us to another world it makes us reexamine our world with a new lens. I highly recommend Serpico because it did just that.
Where would I be in Serpico’s world? Where would you be? I am not suggesting that you or I take bribes but how complacent are we in a broken system?

In the beginning of the book, Nafisi says that she wants to make it very that she isn’t suggesting that Lolita is about the Islamic Revolution in Iran. She was reading and teaching a class about the book during that tumultuous time and it changed the way she perceived things. I think it would be interesting, and will probably be a personal subject in the future, to consider films like Serpico in relation to the corporate culture of today. To help illustrate, let me tell you you a little work experience of mine.

I once worked at a place which required receipts to be submitted on purchases over $50. I overheard from a peer say that he would get his brother to drive him to the airport but he would still expense $40 for cab fare. ‘I wouldn’t do that in a million years,’ I thought to myself, ‘…but I have given huge tips to cab drivers to get me to the airport faster.’

During training for that job, the instructor said, “Even if the hotels provide you with breakfast, don’t report it on your per diem to get an extra $10 or so.” I recalled these statements as I watched Serpico refuse to take money. “Just give it to charity, Serpico,” pleads a dirty cop. He might as well have been saying, “Give it to the cabbie as a tip”. Does that make the world a better place or is it propagating a wasteful, negative corporate culture?

Serpico is one of those movies which I heard was great but I never got a chance to see. If I watched this and let it go, that is, if I didn’t look at it in relation to my world, I would still love it. I highly recommend this movie. It isn't a pizza-action movie type of thing, mind you. Serpico, like any good movie should, made me reflect on me and my world with respect to the images on screen. Very fun stuff. Very fun indeed.