Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
Charlie Simms is a student at a private preparatory school who comes from a poor family. To earn the money for his flight home to Gresham, Oregon for Christmas, Charlie takes a job over Thanksgiving looking after retired U.S. Army officer Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade, a cantankerous middle-aged man who lives with his niece and her family.
Scent of a Woman is carried almost entirely by Al Pacino's towering, Oscar-winning performance as the irascible Lt. Col. Frank Slade — volcanic, funny, and deeply human. The plot is a fairly conventional odd-couple road movie with a coming-of-age framing, elevated by the central dynamic but not especially surprising in its beats. Cinematography is competent and handsome but unremarkable for prestige drama of the era. Novelty is modest — the blind mentor archetype and prep-school ethics subplot are familiar territory, though Pacino's voice and presence give it a singular flavor. The ending, with the courtroom speech, tips into melodrama and feels overlong and too neat, a common criticism that drags what could have been a more ambiguous conclusion into crowd-pleasing territory.