Written in Chicago, set in New York, filmed in LA; written in the early 80's about a man seemingly out of the 1950's and now set in the present day. You'd think the director of "Reanimator" would be ideal for this Frankenstein but instead it's all abby-normal parts that aren't alive.
There are few surprises: Macy simmers, Mantegna is a better actor of Mamet than he is of anything else, Julia Stiles and Denise Richards can't act at all, Bai Ling is gloriously crazy, Rebecca Pigeon wouldn't have a career if she wasn't married to David Mamet (sorry, but it's true), Dule Hill isn't tough, George Wendt looks funny when you put him in a funny wig and give him an accent. There are cheesy slo-mo's, lame jump cuts, 80's music in the background, toughs out of central casting, three-card Monte (!), wide variances in price for proffered services, references to West 79th Street and 14th street while exteriors read "Western Avenue" in Los Angeles, the strip of souvenir shops around Hollywood Boulevard near Little Armenia and an exterior of the Seventh Veil strip club on Sunset near La Brea (also seen in the credit sequence of "Entourage"), and then the number of the escort service is an 847, meaning the north suburbs of Chicago (too far away for it to have been even in the original play, 773 is at least 15 minutes by car, 847 is a long winding 30-45). Perhaps the movie should have been moved back to the 50's where Edmond's utter cluelessness about three-card Monte and ATM machines might be believable, or back where sex was treated like the shocking taboo it is here, or back where casual racism wouldn't have been commented upon, here it is all too much and breaks under the strain of its own incredibility. In a New York where dinner at a restaurant with a bottle of wine runs $100, the prices in this movie are ludicrously low.
The film's climax and nadir are concurrent: the scene between Julia Stiles and Macy. In a rare miscalculation Macy is too manic to be charismatic throughout, overplaying his hand (you see people do this when they're playing Jerry in "The Zoo Story" a lot, they shuffle on drooling and Peter would be out of there before the play had a chance to start). The actress is a complete cipher, so you don't get a feeling that she is mistaking his mania for liberation, and it makes her feel free to declare her own prejudices; she doesn't seem thrilled by the release from convention in his fictional account of the murder of a would-be mugger, instead she just feels dull and screwed-up, we never feel any exhilaration or excitement from her, she manages to croak the equivalent of "wow, that's cool." She gets through both scenes without making a single choice. The sudden "American Psycho" POV of him bearing down on her is jarring in the wrong way, and subverted by Stile's aimless overacting. Have I mentioned she's an awful actress? How many chances do these people get? Don't get me wrong, William H. Macy is a wonderful actor, but I hope he doesn't win anything for this one. There isn't enough to the character and to be honest it isn't his best performance.
Some of the points of the play still hold up, like how nobody really listens to each other, making Edmond's "Remember that somebody listened" pretty hilarious. Perhaps the main problem is that the suspension of disbelief you get in the theatre you do not get in a film. In a film incongruity sinks the whole ship. Maybe that Edmond was so entirely from another planet was believable in the early 80's when the Reagan ship was setting sail, but in this day and age where you're as likely to meet a Marxist in the boardroom as at a street protest it just doesn't work. "Falling Down" made this work obsolete.
There are few surprises: Macy simmers, Mantegna is a better actor of Mamet than he is of anything else, Julia Stiles and Denise Richards can't act at all, Bai Ling is gloriously crazy, Rebecca Pigeon wouldn't have a career if she wasn't married to David Mamet (sorry, but it's true), Dule Hill isn't tough, George Wendt looks funny when you put him in a funny wig and give him an accent. There are cheesy slo-mo's, lame jump cuts, 80's music in the background, toughs out of central casting, three-card Monte (!), wide variances in price for proffered services, references to West 79th Street and 14th street while exteriors read "Western Avenue" in Los Angeles, the strip of souvenir shops around Hollywood Boulevard near Little Armenia and an exterior of the Seventh Veil strip club on Sunset near La Brea (also seen in the credit sequence of "Entourage"), and then the number of the escort service is an 847, meaning the north suburbs of Chicago (too far away for it to have been even in the original play, 773 is at least 15 minutes by car, 847 is a long winding 30-45). Perhaps the movie should have been moved back to the 50's where Edmond's utter cluelessness about three-card Monte and ATM machines might be believable, or back where sex was treated like the shocking taboo it is here, or back where casual racism wouldn't have been commented upon, here it is all too much and breaks under the strain of its own incredibility. In a New York where dinner at a restaurant with a bottle of wine runs $100, the prices in this movie are ludicrously low.
The film's climax and nadir are concurrent: the scene between Julia Stiles and Macy. In a rare miscalculation Macy is too manic to be charismatic throughout, overplaying his hand (you see people do this when they're playing Jerry in "The Zoo Story" a lot, they shuffle on drooling and Peter would be out of there before the play had a chance to start). The actress is a complete cipher, so you don't get a feeling that she is mistaking his mania for liberation, and it makes her feel free to declare her own prejudices; she doesn't seem thrilled by the release from convention in his fictional account of the murder of a would-be mugger, instead she just feels dull and screwed-up, we never feel any exhilaration or excitement from her, she manages to croak the equivalent of "wow, that's cool." She gets through both scenes without making a single choice. The sudden "American Psycho" POV of him bearing down on her is jarring in the wrong way, and subverted by Stile's aimless overacting. Have I mentioned she's an awful actress? How many chances do these people get? Don't get me wrong, William H. Macy is a wonderful actor, but I hope he doesn't win anything for this one. There isn't enough to the character and to be honest it isn't his best performance.
Some of the points of the play still hold up, like how nobody really listens to each other, making Edmond's "Remember that somebody listened" pretty hilarious. Perhaps the main problem is that the suspension of disbelief you get in the theatre you do not get in a film. In a film incongruity sinks the whole ship. Maybe that Edmond was so entirely from another planet was believable in the early 80's when the Reagan ship was setting sail, but in this day and age where you're as likely to meet a Marxist in the boardroom as at a street protest it just doesn't work. "Falling Down" made this work obsolete.