Reviewed by Peter Calder
Cast: Campbell Scott, Rebecca Pidgeon, Steve Martin
Director: David Mamet
Playwright, screenwriter and director, Mamet is one of modern American cinema's most versatile talents who, with his first outing behind the camera - 1987's stunning con thriller House Of Games - showed himself to be among its most original
as well.
His latest movie has many of the elements of his first - the plot trickery is peeled back like the layers of an onion and nothing is what it seems to be - and while it never achieves the classical simplicity of the earlier picture (the denouement seems more like an anticlimax than a triumph, but that's partly to do with the hero's haplessness), it's a smart and satisfying con in which we are willing victims.
I caught up with it for the second time on an aircraft and enjoyed seeing how Mamet leaves the storyline littered with clues - at one point even nudging us with a line of dialogue which, on repeat viewing, seemed obvious. But it's part of his winning skill that he seems to have all the cards on the table and still manage to deal from the bottom of the deck.
Joe Ross (Scott) plays a scientist sitting on a goldmine. We never find out what exactly "the Process" he has developed does, but the profit projections make his boss and board salivate - and Joe begins to fear his bosses might deny him the fortune he deserves.
He's befriended by a fast-talking jetsetter, Jimmy Dell (Martin), who offers him legal protection, but he soon finds out that Dell's watchword - "People aren't that complicated; they generally look like what they are" - is less than sincerely meant.
A labyrinthine plot defies -- and would be spoiled by -- detailed synopsis here, but fans of Mamet's mind games won't be disappointed. The writer-director is in playful mood, always one step ahead of us, toying with our credulity and plying us with alluring false clues.
The effect is heightened by the disarmingly direct performance of Scott, dishevelled of dress and spirit, who embodies our helpless confusion and the ice-cool Pidgeon (Mamet's wife), too wooden to be true and too confident to be ignored.
It's something special -- and even better second time around.
* * * *
--Peter Calder, Weekend TimeOut
-- Peter Calder
