NYT video: Watching Serpico with Serpico. Frank Serpico watches Al Pacino play him on a reporter's laptop.

This is the man whose long and loud complaining about widespread corruption in the New York Police Department made him a pariah on the force. The patrolman shot in the face during a 1971 drug bust while screaming for backup from his fellow officers, who then failed to immediately call for an ambulance. The undaunted whistle-blower whose testimony was the centerpiece of the Knapp Commission hearings, which sparked the biggest shakeup in the history of the department.

Good read: Frank Serpico, Police Officer Played by Al Pacino, Looks Back, but the video above, of his life now in upstate New York and his realtime comments as he watches the 1973 movie (trailer), is even better.

"I had gone through a near-death experience," he explained, "and that gives you an insight into how fleeting life is, and what's important."

After he settled here, his journey turned inward. He eschewed what he sees as an ugly American addiction to consumerism and media brainwashing. He eats mostly vegetarian and organic food, cooking on the wood-burning stove that heats the cabin, where there is neither television nor the Internet. "This is my life now," he said. "The woods, nature, solitude."

Mr. Serpico relies on Chinese medicine, herbs and shiatsu. He practices meditation, the Japanese Zen flute and African drumming, and dance: ballroom, tango, swing. He takes long walks at sunrise and rescues wounded animals. He raises chickens and guinea hens. He has a girlfriend: she is French, a schoolteacher, age 50.

None of which has exorcised the demons of being Serpico.

The story makes him sound bitter, but the terrific video of this soft-spoken man doesn't convey exactly that. He was shunned ("Not one of New York's 39,000 (police officers) showed up to give me blood") but concludes, "I've taken my knocks but i feel I'm a better person for it... You have to go up against the odds to do the right thing. I certainly don't have any regrets," he says.