David Mamet's play about a group of real estate salesmen won the Pulitzer Prize, and Mamet did a fine job of adapting it for the screen, even adding an opening scene in which Alec Baldwin's hyper sales executive presents the group with an ultimatum: close sales on the leads provided them or get fired. It's a play that demands a top notch ensemble, and it gets one on film. Unfortunately, what works for Mamet on stage doesn't work as well on screen. He has a superb ear for the way people talk, the repetitions, non sequiturs, and idiosyncrasies of common speech. On stage, Mamet's verbal rhythms, repetitions, pauses, tics, spasms, and obscenities -- the play has been called "Death of a Fuckin' Salesman" -- become hypnotic. But they lose their coherence in a film, from which we demand visual as well as verbal gratification. The cutting from set to set and from character to character chops up the flow of language and reveals that what these guys have to say to and about each other lacks substance. Even the most sympathetic of the group, Jack Lemmon's aging loser, begins to grate on us. Still, as a portrait of men caught in the rat race of capitalism and awash in toxic masculinity, it has some value.
No comments:
Post a Comment