Word: mamet
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When Shakespeare goes awry, the audience can find redemption in the language. Even bad Shakespeare retains value due to the stirring beauty and evocative imagery of the poetry. Such is not the case with bad Mamet. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s language is all about its peculiar, febrile rhythms. A production which fails to capture those rhythms, therefore, falls flat, losing not only the enjoyment of the dialogue, but all of the richness contained therein. Such is the case in the recent production of Oleanna at the Loeb Experimental Theater...
...David Mamet has emerged as the most revered contemporary American playwright due to his ability to create a distinct language for his characters. Listen to the way the real estate salesmen talk about the “leads” in Glengarry Glenross or how Fox talks about setting up a meeting in Speed-the-Plow. The characters grasp at words as if they were life preservers, futilely attempting to keep their heads above water, eventually drowning in their desperation. To Mamet, the world is a cruel joke; some people are in on it and some aren?...
...professor begins the evening with self-assurance, if he possesses some of the veiled neediness of a typical Mamet salesman, there is that early conflict. If he is sanctimonious and shallow, the student has justification for her antagonism. If he says they are alike only to seem more a man of the people, or better yet, because in his sermonizing he has momentarily convinced himself of that notion, then the play is interesting...
Gene Hackman is the thief, Danny DeVito is his financier, and for two hours they engage in an insanely complicated effort to rob a shipment of gold bullion and double-cross each other. Writer-director David Mamet has so many obligations to his plot that he has neither time nor energy to develop these or any other characters (played by the likes of Delroy Lindo and Ricky Jay) beyond the bounds of genre cliche. Or to dole out more than a few lines of his usually smart dialogue. The result is a well-tooled machine chugging coldly along a twisting...
...lends the opening stages of the film some elegance. DeVito clashes with this atmosphere and ruins it. He plays a major role in the ending, when the film takes a sudden and unwelcome turn for the brutal. His strident, shrill presence does nothing to make the film more watchable. Mamet clearly intended this to be an edge-of-your-seat thriller that keeps you guessing. But he piled on about three plot twists too many, and when he does get to something of a surprise conclusion, everybody has stopped caring. It is also irritating that many of the complications that...