The greatest Pacino film you might never see...

FEW people are so passionate about cinema that they would take a plane to see a film. But to catch People I Know, one of the darkest, most compellingly political thrillers to have come out of America for years, you would have to head south to Italy, where the film has been on release - dubbed into Italian - for more than a month.

This is not the first time an American movie has surfaced in unlikely places before going straight to video and DVD. Usually it means the film's a dog, but People I Know, the second feature from Naked in New York director Daniel Algrant, is in quite a different league. This is Al Pacino's most engaging and nuanced performance since Donnie Brasco. Normally Pacino's take on Ely Wurman, a jaded New York entertainment industry PR, would walk off with an Oscar.

But this is a post-11 September world, and US distributor Miramax seems to have decided that People I Know is, for the time being, unreleasable.

Pacino's character is raddled by booze, pills and lack of sleep, and worn out by the hypocrisy of committing his energies to the service of bad actors and bad plays. He marched for civil rights in the Sixties, and still does his bit by organising fundraisers for oppressed minorities.

Ely begins to uncover a can of worms when the one major talent he still represents - a bronzed, amoral Hollywood veteran with political ambitions played by Ryan O'Neal - persuades him to bail out a supermodel, hooker girlfriend who has flown into town with too many drugs in her handbag. The model (a splendidly brittle Tea Leoni) takes Ely to an exclusive opium den on Wall Street, where he is surprised to see some of the city's leading power brokers.

At the end of a hard night, he goes to sleep in the bath and wakes up to discover that the model has overdosed - or been drugged by someone else.

Until now, the corruption at the heart of the system was just a liberal dogma for Ely; all of a sudden, it becomes a life- threatening reality.

It's not difficult to see why the film is a problem for Miramax. In today's cloyingly patriotic America, a Left-ofcentre movie that exposes the lurid underbelly of New York politics is not an easy distribution prospect.

Especially one that features a mayor who is shown to be systematically eroding the rights of the city's underclass.

Former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani is never mentioned by name, but it is difficult to dodge the parallels with a man who, before 11 September, garnered as much criticism as praise for his ultraconservative policies, which included "zero tolerance" policing and withdrawing funding from the Brooklyn Museum when it dared to stage the Sensation show of inyourface Britart.

But it's not just the Rightwing mayor who is laid bare in this dark and biting satire: the film is equally hard on the ethnic lobby groups that underpin New York's Democrat opposition. A sinister Jewish think-tank deals out obscure threats, while an anti-Semitic black preacher-politician is more interested in jockeying for power than shepherding his flock.

It was originally suggested that the release of People I Know - which was in the final stages of postproduction on 11 September - was being held up by one scene: a drug-fuelled vision in which Ely sees the Twin Towers collapsing. But Algrant, who edited the film just a few blocks from Ground Zero, needed no persuasion to cut this footage. "In the light of what happened, it would have sent out the wrong message," he says. "It's eerie to think that we were scouting for locations around the same time that terrorists were preparing to attack."

In reality, however, Miramax's problem with the film goes deeper than one unwittingly prophetic take. The official explanation for the delayed release is that People I Know would not play well right now; and Miramax-spokesman Matthew Hiltzik is keen to point out that "it's normal for movies to sit around for a year or more until the right release date is found".

THE same argument was used to justify Miramax's freeze of Phillip Noyce's The Quiet American, starring Michael Caine. It is set against a background of America's involvement in French-controlled Vietnam. More than a year after the first test screenings, the film, which shows an American undercover agent helping to organise an anticommunist terrorist bomb attack, is finally being released here next week.

The studio's predicament is understandable. Under supremo Harvey Weinstein it has built a reputation as the defender of risk-taking cinema in an America dominated by Hollywood pap. Right now, though, the company is looking more like an ally of America's powerful moral majority.

Daniel Algrant is fatalistic: "We got mugged by history, but I am hopeful that a promised 2003 release will materialise," he says. "The issues we addressed in the People I Know haven't gone away."

Meanwhile, People I Know is still lying on a shelf, and while Michael Caine now has a sure shot at an Oscar nomination, Al Pacino is going to have to wait until at least 2004.

Copyright 2002
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