With Al Pacino to star, 'Blink' winks at buyers in Cannes

By Sarah Sluis

At the Cannes Film Festival, buyers are being presented with the opportunity to grab soon-to- be-produced Blink, to star Al Pacino and be directed by Stephen Gaghan (Syriana) from his own script. Based on New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell's nonfiction bestseller, which explores the benefits and drawbacks of split-second judgments, the unlikely adaptation was optioned by Leonardo DiCaprio.

Whereas Malcolm Gladwell's book was divided into chapters, each presenting a case study about judging people in an instant, it appears the film will use Blink as a launch point. Pacino will play a father who discovers that his estranged son is good at sizing up people. He tries to place the boy on New York's financial district, where he thinks the skill will net him big bucks. The plot sounds vaguely familiar to Rain Man, if you replace autism with people smarts and Vegas with Wall Street. I imagine the story will be interwoven with moments straight from Gladwell's book, much like romantic comedy He's Just Not That Into You created fictional storylines around examples from the self-help book that inspired the film.

One of the themes of Gladwell's book is that not judging people often yields better results than going on first impressions, often skewed by our prejudices. In one chapter, Gladwell talks about a used-car salesman who offers the same price to everyone instead of guessing a buyer's financial situation and changing quotes person by person. That salesman sells more cars than his colleagues. I'll speculate that the screenplay will make this "realization" the turning point of the film: either Pacino's son uses this strategy from the get-go, and only convinces others late in the game of its worth, or else his attuned sense of what people need and want goes askew, forcing him to change perspectives and adopt the "equal approach to everyone" gambit.

While I'm sure the marketability of Blink the movie will benefit from the popularity of Blink the book, there's a chance that viewers will feel cheated if they get something that deviates too far from Gladwell's scientific but friendly prose. That is to say, what's to prevent the film from becoming too didactic, or simply ignoring the themes in the book? The writer and director of the project, Stephen Gaghan, has proved himself adept at balancing multiple storylines --he wrote Traffic as well as Syriana (in addition to the playboy-comedy Alfie). His work has been critiqued for being too opaque compared to crystal-clear Hollywood plots, but in honor of Blink, I'll refrain from making a similar prejudgment about this story.