David Mamet: The Thing about the Movies by the Guy

There was a time when the "bonus feature" of a DVD was that there was a really clear print of a movie on it. That time, however, is quickly fading into the mists of history. Production stills, teaser trailers, cast bios and making-of documentaries have taken on an appeal all their own, and it's easy to forget what the main attraction was supposed to be in the first place. Fan candy like the DVD edition of The Matrix helped to obscure further the central appeal of the format, and now we live in the world of Star Wars: Episode I, the first DVD to feature a behind-the-scenes feature that's arguably better directed than the in-front-of-the-scenes one.

But the true spirit of the bonus feature is to be found in the commentary audio track. "Access: Hollywood" for film nerds and celebrity stalkers, the commentary track rarely evolves into anything more interesting than "Luckily, they let me keep that shirt I'm wearing," but even then, it's the closest that Joe Rental will ever come to dinner with Brad Pitt.

The audio commentary on the State and Main DVD has its own special feature: It will hold a creepy funhouse mirror up to your idol worship. As you spend two hours in your living room overvaluing the words of William H. Macy and Sarah Jessica Parker, they spend two hours in your TV set overvaluing the words of their own idol, playwright and State and Main writer/director David Mamet. Over time, it becomes sort of funny. Macy, Parker and others take turns at the microphone, but nobody bothers with the usual amiable DVD banter about how it rained all day so they couldn't get that shot, or how they can't memorize lines worth a hoot in hell, so they had to stick Post-Its on the other guy's forehead. They all just talk about what an honor it is to work with David Mamet, what a joy it is to speak his words and how they would have paid the producers for a role in a Mamet flick. The esteemed writer and director doesn't appear in the commentary, and after two hours of David Paymer's breathless adulation, one suspects that Mamet's voice cannot be captured on disc lest it cause mortals to go deaf with ecstasy.

This kind of reverence for David Mamet and his writing is endemic not only among actors (whose respect for Mamet is anything but mutual) but also among critics and the educated, vaguely hip audience to whom studios pitch his movies. And a certain amount of reverence is in order — long ago, Mamet established himself as an agile playwright, adapted his best plays into faithful and vital films, and used his patented hard-bitten writing style to breathe life into a handful of drama/action projects (most notably Ronin and The Untouchables). His earlier successes, however, have had the worst possible effect on his current work — they convinced critics, audiences and the man himself that we are lucky to have whatever he gives us. Everyone seems to start with the assumption that his newest characters are the mythic working men of Glengarry Glen Ross, that they speak the electric, primal words of Glengarry Glen Ross and that they are given the same kind of epic performances as those in Glengarry Glen Ross. That established, the most glaring deficiencies are forgiven: his visually tone-deaf directing style, his increasingly cliché-driven characterization, the rote suspense of his plots, his devolving sense of humor, his utter inability (and lack of obligation) to write consequential female characters, the wooden performances that he demands from actors and the increasingly tangible sense that moviegoers should feel lucky just to see the work of an accomplished playwright. He has become drama's answer to George Lucas; automatic acclaim has shrunk the scope and scale of his efforts, because no matter what he turns out, hey, it's a David Mamet movie. But unlike George Lucas, his hip cachet prevents everyone from bursting his balloon with a long-overdue reality check.

People who appreciated the whipcrack dialogue that Mamet applied so well in a half-dozen great movies have every right to bemoan the hollow desperation that rings throughout his most recent films. Remember any of the jewels that Ricky Jay is forced to mumble in The Spanish Prisoner? "The man said, 'No one who went on a business trip would be missed if he didn't arrive.'" "We must never forget that we are human, and as humans we dream, and when we dream, we dream of money.'" For the new Mamet, any line that adds up to less than the sum of its words is intended as salt-of-the-earth philosophy. And in Heist, released today on video and DVD, it's supposedly funny philosophy, no less. Here Danny DeVito has to do the drudge work: "Everybody needs money. That's why they call it money." And the trailer used that same joke over again in an exchange removed from the film:

DeVito: What made you a criminal?

Gene Hackman: What made you a criminal?

DeVito: Nothing made me a criminal. I am a criminal.

This is like watching "Who's On First" performed underwater, and a casual comparison with the violent, expressive grace of Alec Baldwin's speech in Glengarry shows how awkwardly those lines clunk to the floor.

Perhaps Mamet's writing style just works better for characters and situations that are more than ankle-deep. Heist is about a good-hearted old criminal who wants to retire but gets pulled back in for one last big score where everything goes wrong. In the Shady Rest Cliché Retirement Center, the other clichés don't even talk to that cliché at snack time because of how tattered and hackneyed it is. And the concept at hand is all these characters will get, because background and atmosphere are either ploys beneath Mamet's talents as a scribe or extra work beyond Mamet's obligation to care. Thus Hackman plays a Criminal with a Boat, DeVito plays an Arch Criminal with a Factory, and in Spanish Prisoner, Campbell Scott plays a Man who invented a Thing and works for a Company. You say you'd like to know what it is that he invented? Perhaps, then, you should go see an Ernest movie and leave films like this one to the devotees of the theatre.

Not that there will be much theatre in a Mamet film. In the new generation of his self-directed con movies, any kind of inflection, whether verbal or visual, is strictly prohibited. His words apparently are so rich and true that acting and cinematography are unnecessary. Judging by his recent work, the production of his dream film would involve throwing the camera up in some unobtrusive corner of the spaceship Discovery and having HAL 9000 read the script cover to cover.

Rumors about Mamet's deadening, stopwatch directing aside, the proof is in the pudding — in the process of having his life dismantled, Scott's Joe never gets to be so upset as to use the word "hell." Here is a Hitchcockian twister of a film in which Mamet has confiscated all the exclamation points at the end of his actors' lines and replaced them with commas. And three-quarters of the way through Heist, when one of the characters meets his demise at the business end of a shotgun, the most Mamet allows him is bemused indignity. Sure, his attitude pays off with a delicious little bon mot, but if he can barely care that he's about to die, why should we?

Many people (the denizens of the State & Main audio commentary among them) parrot the line that Mamet "understands the rhythms of actors and their words." This opinion reveals nothing so much as a tacit acceptance of the premise that Mamet's lines will act themselves just fine, without the creative input of an actor or the dramatization of a thoughtful camera. In fact, the whole situation is apropos of Mamet's fascination with the confidence game. Like The Spanish Prisoner's Joe, actors and audiences are presented with a situation that is meant to "play on (their) vanity." We can have an endless string of brainy, suspenseful popcorn flicks if only we accept that his nonsensical lines are witty, that his characters' lack of focus or depth is their truth, that his disdain for the work of actors is the same as a dedication to the pen and that his flat, affectless films are actually subtle. The crime in all this is that Mamet has demonstrated all the makings of a fine screenwriter at different times and in separate films. In order to bring it all back, he'll need to feel obligated to provide a movie theater audience with more than a tarted-up episode of "Thunder In Paradise." For better or worse, though, we will likely have to get over him before he gets over himself.

— Matthew Fisher (roger_thornhill@hotmail.com)