Chinese Coffee (2000) is another of those films directed by and starring Al Pacino that after limited festival showings was never generally released. It’s now part of a boxed set that also includes The Local Stigmatic and Looking for Richard.
It’s a film version of a play by Ira Lewis, written in the early 1990’s and worked on by Pacino and others at the Actor’s Studio throughout the ’90’s. It’s essentially a two person play set in the ’80’s in Greenwich Village, starring Pacino as Harry Levine and Jerry Ohrbach as Jake Mannheim. Harry is 42, an old fashioned, NY, Village starving writer, full of neuroses, eking out an existence so he can continue to write. He’s had two books published that went nowhere, and has just finished his third book, essentially an imaginative take on his life over the past years and his relationship with his long term, now-ex, girlfriend, and Jake and his wife. Jake, perhaps a decade older, is a brilliant, omni-knowledgeable, read everything guy who earns a living as a nightclub photographer. Having written two short stories when he was 19 — and nothing since — he still likes to think of himself as a writer.
Harry has come to see him on a cold February night, trying both to collect some money Jake owes him, and more importantly to find out what Jake thinks of the new book.
Like all Pacino, it’s quite intense, penetrating, witty, and often dark — and very funny. The dialogue is extraordinary, and the understanding of someone who has to write because that’s what he’s about and someone who can’t ultimately deal with that is quite powerful — and resonates far beyond the issue of being a writer!
If you like Pacino, and like great dialogue, you’ll love it.