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Prisoner of the Process
The hunger that lies below its surface makes David Mamet's newest film, The Spanish Prisoner, his most entertaining yet. BY KIM MORGAN
243-2122 EXT. 342 Why is David Mamet so fascinated by con artists? In House of Games he respected their sensuous influence. In Glengarry Glen Ross he pitied their fates if they were inept as salesmen. In Oleanna he revealed their political power. And in Homicide he penetrated their spiritual identity. But what is he really trying to say? What is he revealing beyond his mantra that things are not what they seem and that trickery, good trickery, rules the world? Is he an existential absurdist in the spirit of Kierkegaard or Camus? Or is he more of a Kafka, who with his cold discomfort cannot make any leap into faith--even a leap embracing those things that are grim and meaningless? Though some of Mamet's oeuvre contains a lighter touch (Things Change, and his underrated script for We're NoAngels), he is chiefly associated with works of unsparing flatness. Refraining from method-y overacting, he opts for (and relies a bit too much on) the solidity of underacting. His use of claustrophobic interiors and repetitive, overlapping dialogue reveals the unforeseen complications of systems--systems that appear to be organized but are deeply chaotic underneath. But again, what is Mamet saying? Is he laughing at the absurdity, or plagued by it? In his newest picture, The Spanish Prisoner, he is plagued by it--though the movie is often very funny. Springboarding from a story in which the most important element is something called "the process," he comes closer to Kafka than ever before. Not surprisingly, Kafka's German title for The Trial was Der Prozess, and The SpanishPrisoner also contains a character named Joseph (played by Campbell Scott). A nice, average guy, Joe works as an inventor for a top-secret company. All we know is that Joe has developed a mathematical formula that may reap great wealth. His boss, Mr. Klein (Ben Gazzara), likes him and seems an amiable if ambiguous fellow. Then there is Jimmy (Steve Martin), an enigmatic man whom Joe meets on a tropical business trip. At first he is overly polite, but when Joe returns to the city and bumps into him, Jimmy is arrogant and rude. Soon, however, Jimmy's abruptness is explained, and Joe finds himself in the world of the power-rich, feeling uncomfortable and increasingly paranoid about his situation at work. Joe also has conflicted feelings for a chirpy secretary (Rebecca Pidgeon, Mamet's wife), who aggressively pursues him. When she asks him, "Who is what they seem? Who in the world is what they seem?," she sums up the movie in a nutshell. Or does she? Things become even more complicated when a woman who says she works for the FBI (Felicity Huffman) enters the picture. Enlisting her help, Joe begins to take seriously the secretary's questions of identity, and he listens to Jimmy's advice: "Always do business as if the person you were doing business with were screwing you, because they probably are. And if they're not, you can be pleasantly surprised." Are we surprised by the end of the picture? Some may be. But as Joe becomes more and more a trapped rat, we put obvious connections together that would bog the movie down if Mamet were attempting to emulate Hitchcock. Mamet is no Hitchcock, nor is he trying to be. He certainly isn't cinematic enough. But what he does through language, setting and intrigue is almost as interesting. These people are well-mannered, well-dressed and witty, and even if we think their duplicities are spelled out, they are mysterious. Even with the resulting "winners" and "losers" that close the picture, there is really no one above the Mametian flatline. Mamet begins with flatness, proceeds with the sweating of bullets, and ends with what? Decide for yourself if the outcome is satisfying. Which is exactly the point and one that goes back to Kafka: There is no redemptive learning here. We get the feeling that Joe feels just as much a schmuck as before. Campbell Scott perfectly displays Joe's understated angst. He is neither too handsome to connote innate swagger, nor too neurotic to lack confidence entirely. He is too nice, which will destroy you in the corporate world, but he isn't too warm for the role, and he wraps his tongue around the clipped, staccato Mametspeak just as well as veterans William Macy and Joe Mantegna. As the secretary, Rebecca Pidgeon is annoying and distrustful from the get-go, and she takes the intended monotone effect of Mamet's dialogue too far--she has no screen presence. But Steve Martin is wonderfully cagey. He appears to be perilously on the edge of something outrageous, yet remains effectively restrained. The madman we have seen in past pictures flickers behind his eyes, but he never lets him out; it is deliciously maddening for the viewer. As is Mamet's picture. Though his most entertaining, this is also, below the surface, his hungriest film--even more so than Glengarry Glen Ross. Like Kafka's autobiographical characters and Lindsey Crouse in House of Games, Joe may appear placid, but underneath he is hungry for a spirit, for a way out of the quagmire of not just corporate America but also himself. Does he succeed? Not really--he seems doomed to failure. He echoes what Kafka wrote about his own technique: "...as if one were to hammer together a table with painful and methodical technical efficiency, and simultaneously do nothing at all, and not in such a way that people would say: Hammering a table together is nothing to him,' but rather, 'Hammering a table together is really hammering a table together to him, but at the same time it is nothing,' whereby the hammering would have become still bolder, still surer, still more real and if you will, still more senseless." |
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