Scent of a Woman.

There is an expression we use when an actor is much greater than his or her material. The film (or play) is said to be "a vehicle" for the star. And the vehicle must be custom-built, too. Without this particular actor, the ignition wouldn't fire. The material exists only to serve and exalt an actor. There is no vision in the script, except the vision of a great performance.

Scent of a Woman is Ai Pacino's vehicle, pure and simple. Bo Goldman's script is nothing but a collection of opportunities for the actor. That's the fundamental reason why it's such a lousy script.

The set-up of the action is pure pasteboard. A scholarship boy in an ultra-ultra prep school is pressured by his headmaster to rat on some of his rich schoolmates after they perpetrate a vicious joke. Betrayal will earn Charley Sims entrance to Harvard; silence will cost him any chance of upward mobility. He has a Thanksgiving weekend to ponder the choice. Charley just happens to be spending that holiday as the paid companion of a blinded ex-military man named Frank Slade. Frank coerces and cajoles the boy into accompanying him to Manhattan so that the bitter Slade, a bon vivant who can identify a woman's perfume with one sniff and a wine's vintage with one sip, can spend his last hours on earth savoring the joys of flesh before blowing his brains out.

Now put on your thinking caps. Guess who teaches this boy about Life. You got it. Guess whether or not Frank commits suicide. Right again.' And would you like to speculate on how the student body and faculty react when Father Figure Slade defends Charley against the headmaster during an unlikely school convocation? Uh huh. Zorba the Greek learns that It's a Wonderful Life during a rally of the Dead Poets Society.

Given the machine-like predictability of the script, what an embarrassment this movie would have been if Pacino hadn't delivered the virtuosic goods. But he does. By the end of the film, we know nothing more about the human condition, but we sure know a lot more about the finely tuned acting instrument called AI Pacino.

Pacino has found not only an accent he's never used before (upper-class Southern polished to a high sheen by West Point and many hours spent drinking in the Officers Club) but an entirely new voice. It's a voice so revved up by bellowing at underlings that it can roar even when Slade is perfectly relaxed. Yet this same voice loses its charge and becomes convincingly soft and clouded when Slade gets emotionally unmoored by thoughts of his impending death. In moments of rage, Pacino's accent reverts to the streets of Brooklyn but his vocal timbre never fails him.

Pacino deftly manages the old acting trick of simulating blindness: the actor seems to be staring inside himself at some inner wall. But much more exciting and unnerving is the manic look that possesses Slade's face every so often. This man lost his sight in an accident with a grenade and, at times, it seems as if the muscles in his face were teenacting the moment of explosion.

Pacino gets everything right: the contempt for the boy that later dissolves into fatherliness; the nihilistic self-hatred that vies with Slade's pride in his military service; the dangerous physicality and the voluptuous physicality that alternately pull this man toward death, toward life. The voluptuousness is particularly well done. At one point, having received a haircut from a skilled barber, Pacino gives a quick shudder of delight as the aftershave lotion is patted on. Superb.

But what is the substance of Slade's bitterness that is activated by his accidental blinding? There is none. In this script, blindness is a substitute for characterization. And what is it in Charley Sims's character that finally stirs the better angels of Slade's nature? Nothing. Sims is only a sounding board, not a true character. And even Frank Slade isn't so much a character as a series of emotional stunts bundled under the name of "Frank Slade" and presented to Pacino as a golden Oscar opportunity.

The lousiness of Scent of a Woman isn't mitigated by Pacino's performance. The lousiness is a precondition of Pacino's performance. If the script weren't so shallow, Pacino wouldn't be doing a star turn (undeniably dazzling and enjoyable) but defining a human being in a real story.