A Tale Of Redemption-Al Pacino’s Danny Collins  

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

Danny Collins, starring Al Pacino, Annette Bening, Jennifer Garner, 2015

Every book, song, and film needs a hook, something for the reader, listener, or watcher to hang onto in order to invest his or her time for the duration. The hook in the film under review, Danny Collins, is a letter written to the title singer/songwriter character by John Lennon telling him not to prostitute his creative energies for filthy lucre. (Lennon did write a letter on that subject to an English singer not to Danny so that part is true.)The letter though never got delivered to him until some forty plus years later. That revelation though acts as an epiphany for our boy Danny, played by haven’t seen him in a long time Al Pacino in a stellar performance, to turn his life around. Go back to the basics of what he had originally intended to do with his musical talents and hence the “tale of redemption” in the headline to this review.  

See Danny had not done what John suggested as he had sold out his talent early on after an initial failure at doing his own music. He then accepted bubble gum material provided by others which led to fame and fortune as a rock and roll star complete with filthy lucre. After getting the Lennon letter as a birthday gift from his manager (played by Christopher Plummer) as he turned sixty-something with a life full of drugs, sex with younger women (twenty-somethings including his live-in fiancé), and an over-the-top lifestyle he decided to put the brakes on that slide, try to put things right musically and personally.

So Danny headed to a Hilton, a Hilton in New Jersey if you can believe that redemption is possible in the Garden State. There he gives up, mostly, his wild boy lifestyle and along the way hits on the more age-appropriate manager, played by fetching Annette Bening. But Danny is not in Jersey for the sunny weather but to square things with a son that he had never known, the result of a youthful fling with some groupie. Of course fatherhood for a free-booting rock and roll legend is bound to be a rocky road, and it is. Just as son-hood is for a straight working class guy with an expectant wife and a hyper-active young daughter. Top all that off with the fact that the son, Tom, has a rare maybe fatal disease and you definitely have a rocky road to redemption.             

But Danny tries, tries hard first of all by helping out with the hyper-active granddaughter, then helping his son get through what he had to get through with his treatments, and most of all he tries to get back to that original music dream of his playing stuff that he had written and canning the bubble gum music that made his career. Our boy Danny stumbled a lot along the way, didn’t quite get it right with his son and daughter-in-law for most of the film, didn’t quite connect with that more age appropriate woman as hard as he tried, and wasn’t able, at least in the film, to break from that music that gave him his old lifestyle. But the guy tried, tried and maybe redemption would come later. Despite some predictable syrupy stuff around the granddaughter and his son’s illness a pretty good story line about the price of fame and fortune in the real world. At the end is a nice touch with an interview with the singer whom John Lennon really sent that letter to.