I saw this film on video when it came out, and have published two reviews about it elsewhere over the years. Having read all the other reviews of it on this site I can say only that I am astounded both that anyone should think the ending is weak, and that no one seems really to understand it at all. Though Mamet is a Jew, and may have written this with a deliberately Jewish theme, this is a film that is ultimately not about Jews at all.
There are two distinct strands to "Homicide", and they come together at the end. Detective Robert Gold is on the trail of a black gangster who has not simply blood but police blood on his hands. In addition to tracking down this guy he is given the task of looking into what appears to be an attack on an influential Jewish family. Gold resents this not because they are Jews but because he has a more important task at hand, and doesn't like people higher up the food chain pulling wires to curry favour at his expense - as he sees it.
However, this alleged attack is quickly linked in his mind as in other people's with the murder of a lowly, elderly shopkeeper who as well as being Jewish has a semi-secret past. When he finds a piece of paper on a rooftop, a piece of paper with a strange word written on it, he becomes convinced there is a conspiracy at work, and without realising it, becomes drawn into an entirely different conspiracy himself.
Robert Gold is first and foremost a police officer, a specialist hostage negotiator, he realises at the end of the film that this rather than his ethnic or lapsed religious identity is what defines him, and that he has betrayed his own kind. Alas, he is not the only one, because the man he is hunting has been betrayed after a fashion, by his own mother. And when Gold learns the prosaic truth about the murder of the shopkeeper and the true significance of that piece of paper, he realises the extent of his own folly.
Truly a masterpiece.
There are two distinct strands to "Homicide", and they come together at the end. Detective Robert Gold is on the trail of a black gangster who has not simply blood but police blood on his hands. In addition to tracking down this guy he is given the task of looking into what appears to be an attack on an influential Jewish family. Gold resents this not because they are Jews but because he has a more important task at hand, and doesn't like people higher up the food chain pulling wires to curry favour at his expense - as he sees it.
However, this alleged attack is quickly linked in his mind as in other people's with the murder of a lowly, elderly shopkeeper who as well as being Jewish has a semi-secret past. When he finds a piece of paper on a rooftop, a piece of paper with a strange word written on it, he becomes convinced there is a conspiracy at work, and without realising it, becomes drawn into an entirely different conspiracy himself.
Robert Gold is first and foremost a police officer, a specialist hostage negotiator, he realises at the end of the film that this rather than his ethnic or lapsed religious identity is what defines him, and that he has betrayed his own kind. Alas, he is not the only one, because the man he is hunting has been betrayed after a fashion, by his own mother. And when Gold learns the prosaic truth about the murder of the shopkeeper and the true significance of that piece of paper, he realises the extent of his own folly.
Truly a masterpiece.