Word: mamet
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...Liberals think it's about sexual harassment. Conservatives are sure it's about intellectual terrorism. Even Playbill splits the difference: half the front covers put a bull's-eye on the haughty college professor, the other half on his dim, dogmatic female student. Playwright David Mamet's off-Broadway zinger holds a mirror up to muddled modern life...
Hence Hoffa, an utterly externalized view of the corrupt, crusading boss of the Teamsters, James R. Hoffa. The R stood for Riddle, and David Mamet's lean script is content to leave him at that. Hoffa does stuff -- bullies management, connives with the Mob -- but who is he? The movie gives not a clue. Jack Nicholson looks eerily like his subject, and he has the abrupt gestures and staccato voice of a man who overcomes lack of eloquence by force of will. But director Danny DeVito, who also plays Hoffa's closest ally, gets way too fond...
Music Director Josh Ranz has obviously worked hard with the cast and orchestra. Most scenes feature several actors all singing in different keys, starting on different beats and overlaying each other Mamet-style in lyrics trickier than Cole Porter's. Not only do the actors pull this stunt off consistently, the orchestra actually manages to keep up without overpowering the singing...
...Mamet's Oleanna sets up an innocent-looking encounter between a baffled and seemingly despondent college student (played by Mamet's wife Rebecca Pidgeon) and a haughty and fashionably iconoclastic professor (William H. Macy). His office remarks to her, lashed to a Procrustean bed of rhetorical propriety, wildly and perhaps willfully misinterpreted, become her basis for bringing formal disciplinary charges. He is accused of everything from sexual harassment to disrespect for the learning process. But his worst crime in her eyes is the "elitism" of daring to think that having something to impart makes him more important than those...
...comply with anything just to end the humiliation and pain. His ugly spiral downward is at once outlandish and entirely plausible, and it had this audience member virtually leaping out of his chair in fury at the injustice and unreason. Whatever the bumps -- and there are a few in Mamet's staging of his text -- the power to incense, like that to sadden or amuse, is reason enough to cheer for the future of the theater...