"State and Main"

Hollywood scheming: In David Mamet's delicious new ensemble comedy, the bastards win.

By Charles Taylor

Dec 22, 2000 | Actors love to speak David Mamet's dialogue because the guy is a whiz at actors' rhythms. The profanity-laden exchanges between his stunted and desperate characters build up a rumbling momentum, only to be interrupted by sudden pauses for them to mull over some carefully nursed grudge. The back-and-forth rhythms of Mamet's words carry the actors along. When he brought that talent to Chekhov in his adaptation of "Uncle Vanya" (used in Louis Malle and Andre Gregory's "Vanya on 42nd Street"), the result not only respected the source but lifted the play from the stilted quality that can mar translations (particularly period translations).

But in his original work, Mamet has never transcended his own puny worldview. His scripts read and play like an aestheticized version of some loudmouth holding forth in a bar, bellowing that it's all crap and that the bastards always win.

The bastards win in Mamet's new ensemble comedy "State and Main," but for once he treats their victory as a sly joke instead of an indictment of our moral malaise -- or whatever it is he's indicting. The first 40 minutes of the movie are all rhythm, the most sustained, and certainly the most enjoyable, demonstration of Mamet's talent for crisscrossing dialogue.

The story is about an under-the-gun Hollywood movie crew that gets kicked out of the New Hampshire town in which it was filming. The filmmakers hurriedly decamp to another town over the border, in Vermont. The casually frantic activity of the picture's opening minutes is worthy of classic screwball comedy. Crew members zip around one another and around starstruck townspeople as if they were missiles homing in on a target. The director, Walt Price (William H. Macy), holds two or even three conversations at once, shifting lickety-split from glad-handing insincerity to cranky exasperation. One minute he's buttering up the mayor (Charles Durning); the next he's telling his costume designer, "These look like Edith Head puked and the puke drew these sketches!"

Whenever the movie's screenwriter, Joe White (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a playwright working on his first movie, wanders into this buzzing hive he comes out looking like a cartoon character who gets spun around in a revolving door and emerges like a drunken man trying to find his footing. There's a teenage waitress (Julia Stiles) determined to appeal to the appetite of the leading man (Alec Baldwin) with BLTs and other things besides.

The female star (Sarah Jessica Parker), of whom one crew member says, "America can draw her tits from memory," suddenly balks at her nude scene -- unless she gets an extra 800 grand upfront. And the old mill that drew the crew to this town has, the filmmakers discover, burned down years ago. This is a problem, since the name of the movie they're shooting is "The Old Mill" and Joe has no idea how to begin the rewrites Walt is demanding.

The clash between Hollywood sharpies and wily small-towners is not perhaps the freshest idea for a comedy; behind-the-scenes comedies about moviemaking have started to feel less like satire and more like self-congratulation, a chance for moguls and egotistical stars to say, "Yep, we're pricks all right" and think that prickiness makes them what your grandmother called "a real character." When he's cooking, Mamet makes Hollywood vs. small town seem still fertile comic ground. The small-towners may be agog at the stars in their midst, but they're not rubes. (There's a neat, tossed-off gag in which two diner denizens trade their morning paper for Variety.)

In Mamet's hands, Yankee distrust becomes a wizened strain of comic cunning. When you laugh as freely as Mamet does at the townspeople's lack of sophistication and their wariness of the sophisticate swells in their midst, you have the opposite of snide laughter -- it's just honest amusement at people's quirks. It's a good joke that the town's mayor has the same name as the hero of "It's a Wonderful Life" -- George Bailey. Mamet is sending up Capra's phony idealization of small-town America, and doing it with the spirit of Preston Sturges.

Unfortunately, he can't sustain it. An accident at the intersection that gives the picture its name saddles the movie with an ethical predicament at the very moment when the farcical complications should begin escalating into madness. At the center of the predicament is Joe, whose new girlfriend, Annie Black (Rebecca Pidgeon), wants him to tell the truth even though the truth could end his screenwriting career.

Next Page: Mamet gets only halfway to a great screwball comedy

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