Metro Pulse/Movie Guru/Heist

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Meditative (3 out of 5)

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David Mamet goes a trick too far in Heist

by Jesse Fox Mayshark

David Mamet loves the con. The writer-director returns again and again to an imaginary world where everybody is running a game on everybody else and nothing is what it seems. In House of Games, his first (and still best) film, he shepherded Lindsay Crouse's rigidly repressed psychiatrist through a rat maze of double-crosses and switchbacks. In Glengarry Glen Ross, the sleazy real estate salesmen used every trick from flirtation to outright lying to seal their deals. In The Spanish Prisoner, Campbell Scott's mild-mannered financial theorist was the ostensibly easy mark for a Byzantine corporate espionage scheme. In Wag the Dog, the political satire Mamet co-wrote for director Barry Levinson, the con was on the American people as a whole. (A side note: with the Bush administration suddenly getting all chummy with Hollywood and enlisting directors and producers to "get America's message out," the latter film is unnervingly timely.)

Mamet's fascination has always been twofold: with the grifters themselves, and with the way people respond to them. The attraction is obviously real. One of Mamet's pals and frequent featured players is Ricky Jay, a magician-turned-actor who has written several books on the history and mechanics of hucksterism. You can imagine Mamet and Jay trading card tricks between takes.

Jay is with us again in Heist, Mamet's latest convolution, along with Gene Hackman, Danny DeVito and the affected tough-guy dialogue we've come to expect from the playwright-turned-filmmaker. Mamet's way with words is one of his big selling points, and it's the reason he's able to draw A-list actors into his modest-budgeted projects. The rat-a-tat rhythms of the lines turn every scene into a verbal Mexican standoff, with metaphors flying like bullets.

Heist has its share of memorable zingers, which Hackman and DeVito clearly savor: "Everybody needs money. That's why it's called money." "I don't want you to be as quiet as an ant pissing on cotton. I want you to be as quiet as an ant not even thinking about pissing on cotton." And it has plenty of betrayals, backstabbing and bait-and-switches. What it lacks, sadly, is much of a purpose.

The storyline, about a veteran thief (Hackman) trying to make one last score before sailing off into the sunset with his young wife (Rebecca Pidgeon), is so hackneyed that I initially assumed it was a set-up. I looked forward to Mamet folding the clichés back on themselves as he has before, cheerfully distracting us with red herrings all the way. But when the credits rolled at the end, I was still waiting for the punchline. For all their surface trickery, most things about Heist are exactly what they seem.

That includes the characters. Hackman plays jewel thief Joe Moore, one of those grizzled vets whose credentials we're supposed to accept as a given (actors of Hackman's generation—Eastwood, DeNiro, Nicholson—seem incapable of playing anything but grizzled vets these days). He has the requisite seasoned, loyal crew (Jay, Delroy Lindo) and the obligatory urge to chuck it all and spend his autumn years lazing around in the South Pacific. There's also the predictable stumbling block, the "one last job" that his longtime business partner Mickey (DeVito) has arranged and won't let him back out of. And to ensure that Joe doesn't pull anything funny, Mickey sends along his hot-tempered nephew Jimmy Silk (Sam Rockwell), who of course proceeds to almost botch everything.

Things go one way, then another, and another again as the characters maneuver and manipulate each other for uncertain ends. But what's surprising about the various twists is how unsurprising they turn out to be. Part of Mamet's problem is that he's conditioned us now to expect the plot feints and sleights of hand—we're always looking for the card up his sleeve. When it turns out to be just a two of clubs, or not to be there at all, it's a letdown. The other problem is the characters themselves. It's not only that they're not particularly likable—neither were the protagonists of House of Games or Glengarry Glen Ross. They're simply not very interesting. Even if you accept the plausibility of Mamet's stylized underworld, with its sloe-eyed femmes and floridly articulate thugs, the crew of Heist seems to inhabit one of its lesser backwaters. What we end up with is a bunch of low-level crooks hatching ill-conceived plots against each other, with nobody gaining much for all their bluster and bloodletting.

As usual, Mamet comes across in his work as a control freak, with even the pauses and breaths between words precisely timed. It's no wonder he evolved from the stage, where the writer is king, to the cinema, where the writer-director is an even bigger king. And it's no wonder he loves con games, where the grifter's goal is maintaining complete control of the system at the same time he's convincing you that you have a chance to beat it. But cons get tiresome past a point, because you realize you will never, ever win. In Heist, unlike any of his other trick shows, Mamet doesn't even bother to provide a sympathetic mark for the audience to identify with. Although it's intermittently fun to watch, you realize in the end that there are no peas under the shells and the only sucker here is you. Of course, by the time that sinks in, Mamet already has your money.