State And Main

10 April 2012

David Mamet, than whom no other playwright has a hotter tongue for street talk, a keener eye for a human weakness or a sharper knife for slaughtering sacred cows, may be going soft at the centre in his other ego as a film director.

After successfully replicating the Edwardian formalities of a well-made play like Rattigan's The Winslow Boy, he homes in on the Preston Sturges-like potential of the 1930s screwball comedy. The result is chucklesome, but bland and low-powered. A Hollywood film crew takes over a New England hamlet to shoot an 18th century period drama called The Old Mill and meet resistance from the local worthies who want to preserve peace and quiet while milking the visitors for a few bucks, too.

The crew members have their own troubles. The director (William H Macy) has to grapple with a whining lead actress (Sarah Jessica Parker) who thinks her nude scene is worth 800 grand more. His Errol Flynn-ish male star (Alec Baldwin) is caught with an underage girl ("Everybody needs a hobby," he pleads). The screen-writer (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is being compelled to work a "place-ment" for a computer product into the 18th century setting. And the Old Mill, which drew the unit to the burgh in the first place, is discovered to have burned down decades ago and been replaced with a fire station.

Everyone tries to control everyone else - a Mamet perennial - but everyone finds film-making is chaos management. The continuous contretemps are mildly funny, but overly familiar: that wouldn't matter too much if the pace were hotter, the editing sharper. But Mamet plays it without the escalating zaniness required by screwball comedy, and too many scenes end a fatal second after they should.

The one man who grasps the heartless rhythm of the classic genre is David Paymer, playing a totally amoral producer who believes - correctly - that all sins can be paid for in cash and a bag of dollar bills in the hand is worth a bushel of script alterations to buy peace. The wittiest line isn't spoken, but written: the closing credit, which reads: "A full list of this film's associate producers is available on request."

State And Main
Cert: cert12

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