"State and Main"

The problem is that -- in this case -- telling the truth is exactly the wrong choice, a way for an ambitious small-town pol to further his career on trumped-up charges. Mamet has the good sense to let the characters who are less bothered by ethics carry the day, but he needs to satirize Joe's dilemma as well. It just feels unnaturally cozy when a movie this enamored of its hucksters refuses to make fun of a guy who has to grasp that sometimes justice demands lying.

At its best, "State and Main" is fast and sharp, but when a movie like this goes off the rails, it's more disappointing than when a bad movie does. Mamet gets about halfway to great screwball comedy before the picture runs out of steam. What keeps you watching then is the nifty ensemble work. In Mamet's past movies, I've never been sure how to take Pidgeon (Mrs. Mamet); her mixture of aggressive, possibly deranged brightness and flat affectlessness, of superiority and self-deprecation, was like a radio signal fading in and out, too distant and quavery to get a fix on.

As Annie, the town's bookstore owner and queen of its amateur theatricals, Pidgeon is just as odd, but in the great tradition of American comic eccentrics. Pidgeon's internal clock must run about a minute-and-a-half faster than everyone else's. She has the alertness of someone who's always a couple of beats ahead and doesn't sense that anyone else is having trouble keeping up with her. If you can imagine a confident, assured, brainy version of Carole Lombard's dizzy breathlessness (in L.L. Bean instead of "gowns by Adrian"), you might get an inkling of what Pidgeon does here. For Joe, Annie is like one of those on-board computers that come in luxury cars in case you get lost. She's the little voice in his head, steering him through rewrites and the minefields of movie production. Hoffman, who continues to amaze through his sheer range, is as endearingly bewildered here as he was endearingly bearish playing Lester Bangs in "Almost Famous."

Macy turns his nice-guy quality inside out as the director hiding his manipulativeness inside supplication. He's got a story to calm down his skittish actors in every crisis and his smooth, practiced tone lets you know that each one is total bullshit. Parker navigates the hypocrisy of prudish exhibitionism with amusing deftness. The confrontation between her and David Paymer, as the Jewish movie mogul from hell, is a minicollision of phony dignity and undisguised vulgarity.

Paymer is like Sammy Glick come back as part Terminator, part Johnnie Cochran. He's got all the juice he's ever going to need to snap his fingers and make people disappear. And though he doesn't have nearly enough to do, Baldwin -- after "Outside Providence" -- has lucked into another role worthy of his lunatic comic talents. Watching Baldwin on "SNL" I have laughed myself into stomachaches. I could never figure out how an actor could be so brilliant there and so stiff on-screen.

The answer, I think, is that he's not a leading man but a comic actor with a leading man's good looks (and, if you look at the scenes in "Outside Providence" where he mourns his wife's suicide, an actor's capacity for grief). With his Pepsodent smile and perfect black pompadour, no one in the movies can be more fatuously funny than Baldwin. When he's approached for an autograph by a freckle-faced kid who looks as if he was cryogenically frozen at MGM central casting in 1945, and the kid tells him his hobby is baseball, Baldwin's smile freezes while he searches for a response and comes up with, "Well, that's our national pastime!"

The pleasure of watching Baldwin here is much the same as the pleasure of watching Mamet's work. Cutting up, forgoing intensity for slyness, they're both working closer to their true talents. For all its faults, "State and Main" isn't straining to be outrageous, and for all the meanness of its characters, the movie itself is never mean. I'd love to see Mamet try another comedy and build on what he does here. He might just have the sort of cheerful cynicism to give American comedies the kick in the ass they've been bending over and begging for.

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