David Gordon Green, the director of Manglehorn, which stars Al Pacino as a small-town locksmith dodging sex, death and violence, has won an appeal to overturn the film’s original R rating. It’ll be released in the States as a PG-13, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
The “restricted” classification, as decided by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), dictates that under-17s must see the film with a parent or guardian. It can hobble a film’s chances at the box office, with many US cinemas refusing to show R-rated films.
Manglehorn, which debuted at last year’s Venice film festival, has been given the PG-13 rating “for sexual content, language and for accident and surgery images”. The film’s centrepiece is a shot of Pacino wandering past the site of a car accident, in which bloodied, injured people lie next to smashed watermelons. Other scenes, featuring Pacino’s co-star, the director Harmony Korine, are set in a strip club.
The R rating is often contested by film-makers looking to get their movie in front of as wide an audience as possible. In 2013, the Weinstein Company successfully appealed against the R rating given to Philomena, which stars Judi Dench in the real-life story of a woman’s search for the son she gave up for adoption at birth. The film was originally given the restricted rating for two uses of the word “fuck”.
Recently the MPAA has courted controversy by giving Love Is Strange, a sex-free drama about a long-term relationship between two men, the R rating. They gave the same classification to the gay-rights drama Pride last year, despite the lack of sex or violence in the film. Gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell called the MPAA’s decision “outrageous, knee-jerk homophobia”.
