A HELLRAISER ASCENDS THE PODIUM

Posted on by Mick McAloon

He came swaggering in, flanked by security, though I can’t say he looked as if he needed protection.  He looked like he was ready to start a fight himself—with himself.  His talented and beautiful wife was by his side, a picture of graciousness and serenity.  What was she doing with him, embroiled in his drama?  She seemed so much more reasonable than he did.   He was an “ass”; I had heard her say it.  So what was my excuse for being here—professional considerations aside—if not to play some part in his wild circus? 

Well, I thought he was a great actor; I still do.  From a young age he had tremendous presence, though sometimes he could overwhelm a project with his intensity, and also with his sheer unlikability.  Indeed, I admired the way he didn’t attempt to hide his obnoxiousness and actually pushed it out into the world, like it was a good thing; this seemed to make him rather appealing—endearing, even. For it takes great heart to be so unpopular on a global scale, especially in a profession where one of the perks is instant adoration.  But he was having none of that—adoration, I mean—least of all from the festival organizers, of which I was one.  He seemed determined to court unpopularity, controversy, in the same way that I had been willing to court him.  I have to admit that he was my idea.  Why?  I’m still trying to figure it out.  Of course, it boosted my standing within the programming team, gave me a leg up.  But everyone guards their kingdom, and I sensed immediately that some of my colleagues were no longer treating me as they had when I first arrived as a programming associate.  The situation made me think of something my wife said on our honeymoon when we had not yet shed our awkwardness: we were innocents in buffet world, still holding on to our plates, clasping them to our chests, when we should have been looking for knives.

DAVID MAMET’S HONEST HYPOCRITES

Posted on by Mick McAloon

Whenever I watch David Mamet’s films, I am reminded of William Hazlitt’s brilliant essay on actors.  Actors, wrote Hazlitt, “are the only honest hypocrites.”  To which we might tentatively add those honorary members of the acting profession—the con man and the politician.  From House of Games to Wag the Dog, Mamet has presided over films that are like elaborate tricks, in which con-artists act out roles in exquisitely designed scams.  Whichever way you look at it, somebody is always being duped—and that includes us.

In Redbelt, Mamet’s ninth film as a writer-director, it’s Mike Terry (Chiwetel Ejifor), a jiu-jitsu instructor, who gets seduced by Hollywood-types and scammed by fight promoters, all in the name of entertainment.  Money’s involved, as it usually is in Mamet, and pride and honor is thrown into the mix.     Mike is ex-army, though what he did “out there”—presumably Iraq —is only briefly alluded to. (Mamet has always resisted back-story.) Mike runs a jiu-jitsu academy in L.A., training, among others, cops and doormen in the art of self-defense.  Two incidents early on trigger the plot. In the first, a woman (Emily Mortimer) enters the academy and (inadvertently) shoots out a window, narrowly missing one of Mike’s cop-students.  In the second, Mike comes to a movie star’s rescue in a nightclub brawl.  Both scenes establish Mike’s character—honorable and tough.  And both leave him vulnerable to outside forces.  The film charts Mike’s journey from idealist to practical idealist.

Mike’s idealism is taken for weakness, though his wife would probably call him naïve, or at the very least mock his purity.  Mike is a fighter who refuses to fight—“competition weakens the fighter”, he tells her.  His wife sees this adherence to a code as a refusal to participate in the messy business of life.  She would seem to be the practical one.  Where Mike talks in such abstract terms of not wanting to bring shame or dishonor upon the Academy, she just wants to keep the damn thing open, trading for business.  Money’s tight, a problem which becomes further exacerbated after Mortimer’s explosive entrance. When we first see Mortimer, she’s driving through LA in search of a prescription: cascading rain, agitated wipers, and deserted streets. Things are that bad you half expect her to run into Julianne Moore and Magnolia’s biblical downpour. Mamet has always loved noir’s theatrical landscape, a place where he can house his games.  Redbelt, then, has one foot in noir and the fight picture, while simultaneously reaching for the nobility of the Samurai film.  Certainly, Ejifor’s performance, and the role as written, is more in keeping with the latter. It’s a lovely performance—calm, centered, physically contained, and not unlike Val Kilmer’s Special Forces operative in Spartan, though Kilmer had his own cool, quizzical thing going on.

Although Mamet works predominantly within established genres, there is always something fresh about his approach.  He moves into genre as one might move into a listed building: he respects the architecture, the building’s history, but makes it feel like home—Mamet world—filling it with the people and the things he likes. His films constitute a democracy ruled by a tyrant: actors and non-actors happily co-exist; the movie star and the repertory player are equally at home; and there is always room for family and friends (Rebecca Pidgeon, William H. Macy, Joe Mantegna, and Ricky Jay).  But all toe the Mamet line (or lines). His famously profane speech is as distinctive and as metronomically precise as a Philip Glass score: tick-motherf***ing-tock. At its best (American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross,) Mamet’s dialogue gives the impression of being ragged and wild, though it is anything but; at its most jarring, the actors speak as though listening to a click-track.  Control is Mamet’s thing, and he rarely loses it.   (Or as Mike puts it, “take the fight out of your face.”)

This extends to his mise-en-scene, which, understandably, is often overlooked because of the dialogue.  Like Robert Bresson, another advocate of non-actors, Mamet constructs sequences from uninflected shots and uninflected performances—Mamet’s dialogue is inflected enough.  But as Phillip Lopate suggested, as early as Homicide (1991), Mamet has been “evolving a personal cinema which may yet stand comparison with that of anyone of his generation.”  I agree.  Think of those modern juggernaughts of genre, the Oceans and Bourne trilogies, fast and slick, franchise-ubiquitous, whose roll-out and distribution patterns enact a kind of zoning—the Starbucks of the multiplexes. Then think of Mamet’s versions (Heist, Spartan), which are bespoke by comparison, European in sensibility, despite the Americanness of the dialogue and the roll-call of Great American Actors who have lined up to shoot his intoxicating breeze—Newman, Pacino, DeNiro, Hackman. For over two decades, Mamet, no less than John Cassavetes or even Larry David for that matter, has been making a form of home movie but without venturing into the deeply autobiographical or personal nature of his plays (The Cryptogram, The Old Neighborhood).  (Although I’ve long thought that the wonderful scenes between Philip Seymour Hoffman and Rebecca Pidgeon in State & Main were a tribute to his wife.)  And then there are Mamet’s views on acting, best exemplified by William H. Macy.  You only have to see Macy in films that aren’t by Mamet (Fargo, Magnolia, The Cooler) to see the influence Mamet exerts on American film. And where would HBO (Entourage) and Showtime (Mad Men) be without  Mamet’s Men (Piven, Slattery)?

In the same way that Virginia Woolf’s unsigned essays for the TLS were manifestos for the novel, as Woolf saw it, Mamet’s essays and books espouse a theory—his theory—of filmmaking and acting, which the films admirably demonstrate.    Mamet is the practical idealist.  The book he wrote for actors, True or False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor, is full of plain speaking advice: “…my views have been informed by and directed toward performance on the stage in front of a paying audience.  That is what acting is. Doing a play for the audience.  The rest is just practice.  And I see the life of the academy, the graduate school, the studio, while charming and comfortable, are as removed from the life (and the job) of the actor as aerobics are from boxing.” 

You could see this as further evidence of Mamet’s control extending beyond the confines of his film set or the rehearsal studio.  Or perhaps it’s simply Mamet’s way of keeping his own actors—his hypocrites—honest.

—Mick McAloon