Martin Brest’s Scent of a Woman runs 156 minutes, and for a long stretch of them it is two movies fighting each other. One is a road-trip comedy about a blind retired colonel and a prep-school kid loose in New York City. The other is a prep-school ethics drama about a scholarship student who won’t name names. Al Pacino won the Academy Award for Best Actor for the first one. The second one is the reason the film holds together at all.
Trailer, via Screen Bites.
Frank Slade’s weekend plan
The setup is plain. Charlie Simms (Chris O’Donnell) is a scholarship student at Baird, an exclusive New England preparatory school. He comes from a poor family and needs money for a plane ticket home to Gresham, Oregon, for Christmas. Karen Rossi hires him to watch her uncle over Thanksgiving weekend: retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade, a highly decorated, blind Vietnam War veteran who has become a cantankerous and cynical alcoholic.
Frank does not stay watched. He takes Charlie to New York City, books them into the Waldorf-Astoria, and lays out his goals over dinner in the Oak Room at the Plaza Hotel. He wants a luxurious hotel, good food and wine, a visit to his older brother, and sex with a “terrific” woman. Then he intends to die by suicide.
That list is the film’s engine, and it is also its trap. Brest and writer Bo Goldman adapted the script from Giovanni Arpino’s Italian novel Il buio e il miele — Darkness and Honey — which Dino Risi had already filmed in 1974 as Profumo di donna. The American version keeps the structure and swaps in Pacino.
The tango and the Jaguar XJS
The film’s two plots barely touch. In one, Charlie and George Willis Jr. (Philip Seymour Hoffman) watch three classmates set up a prank on headmaster Mr. Trask (James Rebhorn), dousing his prized Jaguar XJS with flour and water. Trask learns there were witnesses. He presses them to name the perpetrators and fails. Then he privately offers Charlie virtually guaranteed acceptance to Harvard if he talks.
Trask schedules the disciplinary committee for the Monday after Thanksgiving. That deadline hangs over every scene in New York, and Goldman uses it well: Charlie has a real decision to make and a real cost either way.
The other plot is Frank’s farewell tour, and it is where the film spends its charm. The tango with Donna (Gabrielle Anwar) is the sequence everyone remembers, and it earns the memory. So does the Thanksgiving dinner at Frank’s brother’s house in White Plains, which Frank provokes into a confrontation.
What Randy reveals at dinner
Randy, Frank’s nephew, ends that dinner by revealing the truth about Frank’s blindness. It did not come from combat. Frank was drunk and juggling live grenades to show off for a group of younger officers when the accident happened.
Frank assaults Randy for it. Randy has spent the meal calling Charlie “Chucky,” a name Charlie despises, and Frank’s fury is the film’s clearest sign that he has come to care about the kid. It is also the moment Scent of a Woman stops being a comedy about a difficult old man.
Chris O’Donnell has the harder job and the thinner part. Charlie is decent, watchful and mostly reactive, and O’Donnell plays him straight, which is correct. The supporting cast does real work in small rooms: Rebhorn as the headmaster who thinks he is being reasonable, Hoffman as the friend who folds, Bradley Whitford as Randy, Ron Eldard as Officer Gore.
A running order for the long weekend
| When | What happens |
|---|---|
| Before Thanksgiving | Charlie takes the job watching Frank; he and George witness the Jaguar prank |
| Days after | Trask presses the witnesses, then offers Charlie Harvard for a name |
| Thanksgiving weekend | Frank takes Charlie to New York City; they stay at the Waldorf-Astoria |
| Dinner, Oak Room at the Plaza | Frank lists his goals for the trip, including his plan to die |
| Thanksgiving Day | Dinner at Frank’s brother’s home in White Plains; Randy reveals the grenade accident |
| Monday after Thanksgiving | The school disciplinary committee meets |
Casting what might have been
The role of Charlie Simms drew a remarkable audition list before O’Donnell was cast in November 1991: Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Brendan Fraser, Anthony Rapp, Randall Batinkoff, Chris Rock and Stephen Dorff. Jack Nicholson was offered the part of Frank Slade and turned it down.
Nicholson saying no is the most interesting fact in the film’s production history, because Pacino’s Frank is a performance built on volume. He shouts, he weeps, he delivers the climactic speech to the disciplinary committee like a man closing arguments. The Academy gave him Best Actor for it. The film was also nominated for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published, and it won three Golden Globe Awards: Best Screenplay, Best Actor, and Best Motion Picture – Drama.
It was shot primarily around New York State, with location work at Princeton University in New Jersey, the Emma Willard School in Troy, New York, the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel and the Fieldston School in New York City. Universal gave it a limited release on December 23, 1992, then expanded nationwide on January 8, 1993. It was a box-office success.
Our verdict
Here is what 156 minutes buys and what it costs. The New York weekend is loose, funny and genuinely moving in spots, and the tango and the dinner confrontation are the two scenes that justify the runtime. The Baird plot is tighter and more honest, and it is the one that gives Charlie something to do besides react.
The two halves never fully merge. The film’s best material is in the smaller rooms — Trask’s private offer, the dinner table, the choices the script sets up and leaves standing.
Pacino is the reason to watch and the reason the film is overrated. His Frank is a great show, and the Oscar rewarded the show. But Scent of a Woman works hardest when it is quiet, and the quiet belongs to Goldman’s script and to the actors around Pacino.
The published critical score sits at 5.7/10, and that is about right. It is a good film wearing an excellent performance, and the two are not the same thing.
5.7 of 10.
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