There's a scene in Homicide when a police detective uses the phone in the library of a moneyed Jewish doctor who's grumbled about shots being fired on the roof. The detective begrudges being pulled off a high-profile drug bust because the influential doctor has asked for him. If we had the same amount of time and space to contemplate what we say as it does to write it, we'd all sound like writers. And standing at the phone, the detective lets loose a rigidly interlaced, giftedly prearranged, impeccably performed river of four-letter vulgarities and anti-Semitic comments. Only Mamet could write, and maybe only his then favorite actor Mantegna could play, this dialogue so frankly and persuasively, and yet with such spoken fluency that it has the autonomy of ad-libbing. Then the cop turns around...and he sees that he's not alone in the room. The doctor's daughter, in one of Rebecca Pidgeon's strongest, and smallest, performances, has heard every coarse, vinegary word. She knows something we also know: This cop's Jewish himself. And because she heard him, she compels him to face what he's actually saying.
Set in a nameless, menacing city that's all antiquated storefronts and squat apartment buildings, this low-key but complex web of enigma and suspicion reminiscent of the dialogue-driven narratives of classic Hollywood, is about a man awakening to himself. As the story begins, Detective Bobby Gold, the Mantegna character, is a cop who places his job first, his individual selfhood last. He does not think much about being Jewish. When he gets in a fix with a black superior who calls him a kike, he's all set to come to blows, but we intuit that his resentment develops more out of departmental enmity than an individual feeling of offense. Throughout the movie, Mamet's characters exercise the most candid street language in their ethnic and licentious back-and-forth, as if somehow getting the spite open to the elements is a step forward.
Gold's fuming about the doctor because the murder of the doctor's mother was the occasion of Gold being pulled off the big drug case. The mother, an obstinate old lady, ran a cornerstore in a black ghetto. She didn't need the money, but she declined to move, and she's shot dead in a robbery. Bobby, speeding toward the drug bust with his partner, comes across the scene of the crime by chance. "I'm not here. You didn't see me." But the old woman's son, who has sway downtown, wants him assigned to the case. Because Gold's Jewish, the doctor thinks, he'll truly be concerned. The doctor has the wrong man. What Mamet's having a go at here, I feel, is uniting the composition of a thriller with the gist of an identity transformation. The two cases get all mishmashed throughout, the black dealer on the run, the murdered old lady, and, from a theoretical angle, Bobby's not going to be able to solve who did anything until he solves who he is.
Mamet owns the copyright on oblique, repetitive dialogue steeped in pathos, and this third directorial effort, a great example of a film whose bare-bones VHS and DVD releases go out of print and are salvaged by the relatively recent cinema aficionado DVD collective distributions, namely Criterion, hisses with liveliness and kick, and with offhand colloquial dialogue by Mamet, who takes down-to-earth dialectic design and abridges them into a form of hardened, straight-thinking verse. He's a filmmaker with a lucid awareness of how he wants to advance. He applies the rudiments of time-honored standards, the con game, the mistaken identity, the personal crisis, the cop picture, as scaffold for movies that ask questions like: Who's real? Who can you trust? What do people truly want? Here he has more than a few of his favorite actors, who've made their bones in Mamet stage productions: Mantegna, the now veteran Macy, Jack Wallace, the intriguing character actor/magician Ricky Jay.
I must concede that once again with Mamet's work, I get the impression that the actors are so tied down to the stringent verbatim requirements of delivering his dialogue that they can't entirely let go, be spontaneous, but force a repetitious of something that must be just so. But nevertheless, they seem to genuinely listen to each other and respond, to have shaped around Mamet's steel architecture. After all, the emotional thread is there, and it's strong. A consistent yarn in Mamet's film work is his intellectual use of editing, combining one shot to the next to elicit a line of reasoning, so we make clear sense of the emotions extracted by his story. We feel it even before Gold, or we, realize his relationship to the significant situation, his stakes in it, his fears and desires, and most of all, his challenges. He and all his partners are guys with contour haircuts who smoke cigarettes like they require them, not a cast of weather-beaten teen coverboys. They're middle-aged, stressed and weary. And Mamet makes them clear from their present actions. We get the impression that Bobby Gold is not in harmony with his Jewish identity as, like many of his partners, he has let the job replace the person. Gold has become so case-hardened, he doesn't even know how he sounds, until he hears himself through that woman.
Mamet's dialogue may be extremely mannered and lyrical, but it still serves the story the right way: It evokes, not decides, the reading of a scene, calls up the imagination to give a minimal context upon which the actor establishes character. Evocation, imagination, minimalism, character: Right up the alley of every good writer in every medium it concerns.
Set in a nameless, menacing city that's all antiquated storefronts and squat apartment buildings, this low-key but complex web of enigma and suspicion reminiscent of the dialogue-driven narratives of classic Hollywood, is about a man awakening to himself. As the story begins, Detective Bobby Gold, the Mantegna character, is a cop who places his job first, his individual selfhood last. He does not think much about being Jewish. When he gets in a fix with a black superior who calls him a kike, he's all set to come to blows, but we intuit that his resentment develops more out of departmental enmity than an individual feeling of offense. Throughout the movie, Mamet's characters exercise the most candid street language in their ethnic and licentious back-and-forth, as if somehow getting the spite open to the elements is a step forward.
Gold's fuming about the doctor because the murder of the doctor's mother was the occasion of Gold being pulled off the big drug case. The mother, an obstinate old lady, ran a cornerstore in a black ghetto. She didn't need the money, but she declined to move, and she's shot dead in a robbery. Bobby, speeding toward the drug bust with his partner, comes across the scene of the crime by chance. "I'm not here. You didn't see me." But the old woman's son, who has sway downtown, wants him assigned to the case. Because Gold's Jewish, the doctor thinks, he'll truly be concerned. The doctor has the wrong man. What Mamet's having a go at here, I feel, is uniting the composition of a thriller with the gist of an identity transformation. The two cases get all mishmashed throughout, the black dealer on the run, the murdered old lady, and, from a theoretical angle, Bobby's not going to be able to solve who did anything until he solves who he is.
Mamet owns the copyright on oblique, repetitive dialogue steeped in pathos, and this third directorial effort, a great example of a film whose bare-bones VHS and DVD releases go out of print and are salvaged by the relatively recent cinema aficionado DVD collective distributions, namely Criterion, hisses with liveliness and kick, and with offhand colloquial dialogue by Mamet, who takes down-to-earth dialectic design and abridges them into a form of hardened, straight-thinking verse. He's a filmmaker with a lucid awareness of how he wants to advance. He applies the rudiments of time-honored standards, the con game, the mistaken identity, the personal crisis, the cop picture, as scaffold for movies that ask questions like: Who's real? Who can you trust? What do people truly want? Here he has more than a few of his favorite actors, who've made their bones in Mamet stage productions: Mantegna, the now veteran Macy, Jack Wallace, the intriguing character actor/magician Ricky Jay.
I must concede that once again with Mamet's work, I get the impression that the actors are so tied down to the stringent verbatim requirements of delivering his dialogue that they can't entirely let go, be spontaneous, but force a repetitious of something that must be just so. But nevertheless, they seem to genuinely listen to each other and respond, to have shaped around Mamet's steel architecture. After all, the emotional thread is there, and it's strong. A consistent yarn in Mamet's film work is his intellectual use of editing, combining one shot to the next to elicit a line of reasoning, so we make clear sense of the emotions extracted by his story. We feel it even before Gold, or we, realize his relationship to the significant situation, his stakes in it, his fears and desires, and most of all, his challenges. He and all his partners are guys with contour haircuts who smoke cigarettes like they require them, not a cast of weather-beaten teen coverboys. They're middle-aged, stressed and weary. And Mamet makes them clear from their present actions. We get the impression that Bobby Gold is not in harmony with his Jewish identity as, like many of his partners, he has let the job replace the person. Gold has become so case-hardened, he doesn't even know how he sounds, until he hears himself through that woman.
Mamet's dialogue may be extremely mannered and lyrical, but it still serves the story the right way: It evokes, not decides, the reading of a scene, calls up the imagination to give a minimal context upon which the actor establishes character. Evocation, imagination, minimalism, character: Right up the alley of every good writer in every medium it concerns.