Gives us the Pacino of ordinary deeds, bumbling around and having his experiences, and we see that he is in service—in thrall—to Pacino the actor. And if a certain fuzziness or impressionism attends his memories, well, we get it: He doesn’t want to violate, with too much insight, the precious mystery at the core of his craft.
An uneven memoir that is sometimes a heartfelt consideration of art, and often a perfunctory cradle-to-age-84 overview of his life and career. Pacino doesn’t dish gossip or give much detail about his personal life, but he is passionate about acting ... You can respect his choice not to reveal more, but all those flyby references make the memoir feel forced, constantly straining against his immense imagination.
The book, written with Dave Itzkoff, preserves Mr. Pacino’s personality, with all his intelligence, his wit and his eagerness to talk about the theater history he loves ... If you like your star memoirs with a side of dish, Sonny Boy may disappoint.
Discursively soulful ... The eccentricity of Sonny Boy is part of its charm, and the book’s distinctive voice speaks to a fruitful collaboration between Pacino and Itzkoff ... Shot through with what certainly feels like self-deprecating honesty to go with the well-worn Pacino swagger.
Breezily readable ... [A] sense of voice and aliveness...is what’s best about Sonny Boy ... The push and pull between being open and taciturn, between acute self-awareness and occasional cluelessness, continues throughout the book.
Like spending several hours with a beloved elder ... It’s not that Pacino is falsely modest, but he often seems reluctant to toot his own horn—a quality that is both disarming and frustrating in a memoirist ... The spirit of this memoir: half–victory lap, half-shrug.
Gives us a thorough account of Pacino’s upbringing and early career, which looms larger in his imagination the further it recedes in time. At the end he’s good at evoking memories that haunt him ... As for happiness later in life, he’s both introspective and evasive.
Although the memoir ends with memories of family and friends, it’s clear it’s his films he wants most to be remembered by. This is a book less about a man than an actor through and through.
Nothing in the latter half of the book matches up to Pacino’s vivid rendering of his hardscrabble years. What we get instead are anecdotes and career highlights Pacino has covered for decades in interviews and talkshows ... What redeems these pages are the parts where Pacino reveals his single-minded commitment to his craft.
