Looking for Richard.

Having performed Richard III on and off between movie assignments for the last two decades, Al Pacino decided to make his exploration of the play into a movie self-assignment. For his documentary, Looking for Richard, Pacino persuaded some Hollywood and New York talents to form a temporary and ill-paid company (Alec Baldwin good naturedly grouses on camera that "we're working for $40 a week and doughnuts"), and obtained permission to shoot several scenes at The Cloisters, a branch of the Metropolitan Museum that has a medieval look. The camera follows the star-director and his assistants as they scout other locations in New York, interview scholars and British actors at Stratford, England, set off a fire alarm by accident as they enter Shakespeare's birthplace, get thrown out of an outdoor cafe by New York's Finest for filming without a license, question New Yorkers on the street about what the play signifies to them (blank responses from everyone except one eloquent bum), and squabble among themselves about the project's progress.

Early on, Pacino tells us that the object of his theatrical and cinematic search is to discover just what Richard III can mean to us today, "us" being actors and audience. The answer is supplied in nearly every shot of this lively, bumpy, and very funny movie and it has nothing to do with deformity, political ambition, the nature of evil, or the divine right of kings, but everything to do with the eternal hunger of actors for great roles, juicy dialogue, and tantalizing acting problems.

Watching Alec Baldwin, as the doomed brother of Richard, control the fear in his face as he confronts his assassins and then casts about for a way to dissuade them, we understand exactly what Baldwin is working toward: the portrait of a smooth talker who can't quite con his way out of the ultimate tight spot. Listening to Kevin Conway speak the role of Hastings with diction that's lucid, pleasurable to the ear, and utterly American, we can hear the fact of American Shakespeare, a fact that has been with us since John Barrymore's Hamlet (if not Edwin Booth's) but is seldom acknowledged in the knee-jerk identification of British accents with the Bard. To see Wynona Ryder struggle with the tricky psychology of Lady Anne yielding her body to her husband's murderer is to grasp how an actor can flounder, yet grow through floundering. Above all, watching Pacino himself arrive at rather glib solutions for his portrayal of Richard in the early Machiavellian scenes but then achieve an utterly convincing portrayal of the later, enthroned Richard as a kind of slow-moving deep-sea monster is to understand why Pacino has chosen to return to the role so many times. His journey has been long but getting there is all the fun.