Cinematically, David Mamet is first, a wordsmith, and second, a director. His movies, more often than not, feature unbelievable sequences of dialogue packaged around subtly textured plots in what are basically very raw films.
While not being crude, Mamet’s cinematography is hardly Guy Ritchie’s. His set pieces are more often simple than lush. He rarely falls back on his soundtrack to tell his story. Instead of relying on any of these typical tricks to tell his tale, Mamet offers only his characters and their crisped, cropped dialog.
His latest, Heist, is no exception. A complex tale out of the “one-final-job” school of storytelling, Heist’s characters and their complexities are overwhelming. Mamet, in taking the most basic crime-caper film, risked his own reputation on something so overdone. While his most recent hustle film, Steve Martin’s The Spanish Prisoner, was the complex con of a single man – a rarely done film in Hollywood – the one-final-job storyline is something entirely different. Done to perfection in films like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Out of Sight, and more recently (albeit not as well) in Ed Norton’s The Score, Mamet has still found a way to make Heist appealing without making it seem like any of these films.
Starring Gene Hackman and Delroy Lindo as aging thieves, and Danny DeVito as the man who bankrolls the thefts against their future profit, the film puts together three characters who are never at ease with each other. Hackman plays the criminal about to retire, Lindo his friend, DeVito as the bankroller forcing Hackman into one final theft. Rebecca Pidgeon (Mamet’s real-life wife) and Ricky Jay also star.
But a relatively simple story slowly unravels. After a masterfully conceived theft goes awry – Hackman’s face is captured on camera – DeVito forces him and his crew (Lindo, Pidgeon and Jay) together for the fateful final job: the theft of Swiss gold. The obligatory catch is the involvement of DeVito’s nephew, relative newcomer Sam Rockwell (The Green Mile’s “Wild Bill” Wharton). Inexperienced and seemingly into the job for only himself, Rockwell continually steps on Hackman and Lindo, at one point causing both of them to declare that the job is a no-go.
Mamet loves smart characters, and in Hackman and Lindo, he has two of his best. Playing incredibly smart conmen, their constant scheming throughout the movie is duplicitously brilliant. Rockwell is the constant victim of their schemes. However, the hustles they pull on others sets these characters apart from others Mamet has written. An investigative police officer is convinced that he has done something wrong by the two men, Hackman playing frustrated, Lindo sympathetic. Rockwell almost screws the lie up – he’d rather gun than fun – but Jay keeps him relatively controlled.
Meanwhile, Jay’s character, like his portrayal of a businessman in Prisoner, is sublime. Mamet tailors his best lines for Jay, who delivers them with a polished cool of a man disinterested by all that occurs around him. Jay is a professional conman (he has been the technical advisor for numerous tricks, sleights-of-hand, and illusions in Hollywood films) but he is most notorious for his tricks with playing cards – abilities he has put to use in an Off-Broadway show “Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants.”
Mamet’s characters mesh on screen, hustling and scamming their way towards the gold. DeVito’s character, his best role in at least five years, is paranoid, seeming to know full-well what the audience is realizing: the guys that he’s employing might be running circles around him. Twisting and turning as Hackman tries to manhandle DeVito, and as the diminutive actor comes right back at him, the film relies heavily on a continually redirected plot. But the characters brilliance is hardly important in Heist’s culmination: a botched shootout between DeVito and Hackman.
Like the end of Paul Newman’s Twilight, old men engaged in gun-battle must inevitably do it poorly. Critics have knocked the shootout’s stylistics, but there could be nothing smooth about it. It had to be done in such a way as to make it believable, not cool. A more appropriate critique of Heist would mention the plot’s many sudden reversals. While it is a con film, and as such it must shift, having the characters double and triple back on each other seemed excessive at times. Mamet relied too heavily on his characters’ ability to continually fake it, rather than their ability to do it well enough the first time.
At a certain point in the film, Hackman asks Rockwell if he “ever came up with an excuse that he didn’t have to use.” Rockwell doesn’t understand the query, so Hackman then asks if he’d wasted his time creating the excuse.
Mamet might ask himself the same thing.
With brilliant characters and standout dialogue, Mamet wastes time proving he’s done both. While it certainly doesn’t deep-six Heist, Mamet is capable of much better.
