Heist

David Mamet is one of my favorite writers of all time. Only Samuel Beckett takes up more space on my bookshelf.

As a playwright, he’s the best America has living.
As an essayist, he is without parallel.
As a novelist, he is provocative, innovative and occasionally opaque.
As a screenwriter, he has brought us many sterling entertainments, including The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Verdict, The Untouchables, Glengarry Glen Ross, The Edge, Wag the Dog and Ronin.

Certainly, a writing career for anyone to envy, especially me.

It’s Mamet the director who presents a different kettle of fish.

House of Games, strangely, is still his most satisfying movie. The weird dialogue, the stilted Mamettian acting, all of it is of a piece, it doesn’t seem like it’s poorly done, it seems like a stylistic choice, and the script is very strong.

But every now and then Mamet the director lets Mamet the screenwriter get away with some lazy writing.

In Heist, the characters speak some of the cheesiest “tough guy” lines ever written. It’s all “Is dat th’ thing?” and “You’re burnt! You got old!” and “Walk away” and “Aren’t you as cute as a Chinese baby?” He puts an old black-and-while WB logo at the front of the movie, as if to indicate that he’s taking us back to the WB gangster movies of the 30s, but it doesn’t stick this time as a stylistic choice, it just feels false and clumsy. And not even uber-Mameteer Ricky Jay can get away with a line like: “My motherfucker is so cool, when he sleeps, sheep count HIM.” Come to think of it, I don’t even know what that means.

Maybe it’s because House of Games seems to take place in a kind of hermetically sealed Mamettian fantasy world, but Heist seems to take place in something like our real world, so it seems weird that the actors are all talking like some post-modern 40s tough-guy gangsters.

After seeing The Spanish Prisoner (his second-best movie) I joked to myself that one day, Mamet would write a screenplay that consisted entirely of aphorisms. Heist seems to come close to that.

CHARACTER 1: Waste not, want not.
CHARACTER 2: In’t dat th’ thing.
1: It is.
2: As it was in the beginning.
1: A stitch in time —
2: — is a penny earned.
1: In’t it?
2: We would say that it is.
1: And beauty is but skin deep.
2: Except when it is not.
1: Is dat th’ thing?
2: Dat is th’ thing.
1: Hold ’em or fold ’em, everybody leaves the game.

And so forth.

The script has a number of good ideas in it and plenty of dazzling lines, my favorite of which is “Everybody needs money, that’s why it’s called money,” another non-sequiter which nevertheless resonates.

Mamet the film director sometimes seems to have a certain amount of disdain for the medium he’s directing in. He will occasionally use very old-fashioned, obvious, far-fetched, nonsensical or downright silly plot points, as if to say “Well, the important thing is the drama, whatever gets us from Point A to Point B is good enough. It’s just a movie, after all.”