State and Main

By PETER CALDER

(Herald rating: * * * * )

Almost too nice to be a David Mamet film, this sly satire of Hollywood lacks the existential bleakness - not to mention the excoriating dialogue - of Oleanna, say, or Glengarry Glen Ross.

The rapid-fire dialogue is still there, but it's leavened with a sense of comic timing which owes more to the stage than the editing bench, one suspects.

Mamet, America's pre-eminent contemporary playwright, knows plenty about being in the belly of the beast, of course. As writer of titles like The Verdict, Hoffa and Hannibal, as well as his own brilliant, quirky concoctions, he's seen Hollywood in close-up.

But if he bears grudges, there's no sign of it in this affectionate send-up which nibbles at, rather than bites, the hand that has for so long fed him and has none of the bitterness of his 1988 play about Hollywood, Speed The Plow. The film follows a film crew which descends on a small New England town (the title refers to an intersection which is the location for a key event) to make a turgid costume drama called The Old Mill.

The lineup for the film-within-a-film might have been a gallery of stereotypes but because they make fun of making fun, they never end up that way. Baldwin is the slightly seedy star who explains his passion for 14-year-old girls by saying a man needs a hobby.

Parker is his co-star who wants an extra fee for appearing nude even though, as one harried exec remarks, the whole nation could draw her breasts from memory. Macy is the hyperactive, two-faced director and Hoffman, a more lighthearted version of the Coen brothers' neurotic writer Barton Fink.

What energises Mamet's storyline is that the townsfolk turn out to be as mercenary and manipulative as their guests and watching the power struggle, which neither party admits is going on, is the film's richest pleasure.

If it has a fault, it's an uncertainty at times whether it's subtle satire or broad farce. The comedy works best when disaster is threatening rather than erupting in pratfalls.

And Pidgeon, Mamet's wife, is -just as she was in The Winslow Boy and The Spanish Prisoner - utterly wrong for the role of the town's theatrical maven who relishes the civilising effect of the invaders. Her hesitant, syncopated style of speaking distracts rather than deepens. She remains the director's Achilles heel.

Cast: William H. Macy, Sarah Jessica Parker, Alec Baldwin, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Rebecca Pidgeon

Director: David Mamet

Rating: M (offensive language)

Running time: 102 mins

Screening: Rialto from Thursday