Originally published 3/14/04
SPARTAN
Director: David Mamet
Writer: David Mamet
Producers: Art Linson, Moshe Diamant, David Bergstein, Elie Samaha
Stars: Val Kilmer, Derek Luke, William H. Macy, Tia Texada
As a Special Forces operative with espionage experience, tough-guy Scott (Val Kilmer) is several times called upon to exchange code phrases with people. “Get me the Chinaman” he barks into a pay phone – “tell him it’s the only man who ever saw Jesus!”
In most movies, this would be fairly incongruous even as code-speak. But this movie takes place in Mamet world, where convenience store shoppers walk by Scott having this conversation and don’t bat an eye. And this is because, in Mamet world, not only is this normal for code-speak, it’s normal for casual discourse.
Don’t get me wrong, I live for the stuff. No one writes like the acid-penned, rat-a-tat auteur behind House of Games, The Spanish Prisoner, State and Main, and a long list of heralded stage plays like Glengarry Glen Ross. His characters spit linguistic convolutions at each other with a private history of nuance that it doesn’t matter if anyone else groks. They mumble the most bizarre non-sequiters straight-faced, like in their universe it’s a cliché as shopworn as “There’s a sucker born every minute.”
In Spartan, Mamet uses this to throw his audience off-kilter, you’re rarely sure there isn’t something else going on in this dialogue you don’t understand yet. It’s a gift, because once you boil the style away the story reveals itself to be a clever but not-exactly groundbreaking paranoid conspiracy thriller.
“The Girl” is kidnapped. Of that we can be reasonably certain, since for the first hour at least 20-percent of the dialogue consists of characters, mostly Scott, shouting at people: “Where’s the Girl!” – then punching, bone-breaking, or threatening unspeakable things with knives to men and women, young and old, when no answer is provided.
“The Girl”, if we haven’t had it explained to us already in the trailers, is revealed through clues to be the daughter of the President. She got a new haircut, argued with her boyfriend, and then during one missing hour…vanished.
This is but the kickoff, and I’d be loathe to deny you the surprises ahead, but if you’re watching and you don’t know everything that’s going on – because Mamet, bless his heart, never feels the need to have characters stand around explaining it to you – you’re in the same boat as most of the people on-screen. Even the kidnappers, we come to discover, have failed to understand something pretty important.
And so Scott is the man ordered to cross whatever barriers are necessary to bring her back in a timely matter. It is, after all, an election year, and the mere fact that this is brought up frequently under the circumstances gives some indication of the mindset of the administration in power.
Kilmer makes a good stab at re-inventing himself here; he’s bulked up some, no longer trying so hard to stay pretty, his face has hardened into a middle-aged glower for which Tom Berenger would happily accept royalty payments. He convinces us of the existence of a man who can profess to have little imagination or education, but who can spontaneously generate a verbal dressing down like “You wanted to go through the looking glass. Well how was it? Was it more fun than miniature golf?” By that standard if no other, he acquits himself well.
Many of Mamet’s unofficial acting company (i.e. the people who can handle his dialogue without sounding too ridiculous) show up as well. Chief among them is William H. Macy, spot-on as a worried operative who may not be worried about what you think he’s worried about. And though she’s not credited, I do swear I spotted Mamet’s wife-and-frequent-leading-lady Rebecca Pigeon (The Winslow Boy, State and Main) in a cameo as a woman whose exercise of 2nd Amendment rights has most unfortunate consequences.
As a director Mamet has developed an uncluttered visual style which he frequently espouses in excellent books like On Directing Film. And for the stories he tells, his argument is convincing. It’s sort of Hitchcock-montage-theory by way of Clint Eastwood – he shows you what the shot needs to show you to advance the story and doesn’t succumb to the desire to be “interesting”. And so the cool color scheme and subtle camera work of Juan Ruiz Anchia may not draw much attention to itself – and that’s exactly right for this movie. Subtle is the watchward for all the craftsmen, there’s no flash but a lot of solid work up and down the line.
There are times, unfortunately, that for all its street poetry I do think that Mamet’s dialogue outsteps its goal and is deliberately looking to spin our head around, and for that he gets docked.
And although he operates like a practiced sleight-of-hand magician – waving something in front of us while the other hand works the trick – he has a habit, especially in his climaxes, of suddenly ditching his sense of reserve and shoving something right down our gullets. Be it a final thudding clue or a dues-ex-machina appearance, maybe he fears that we won’t swallow it and blinks, because without it the whole will be lost. Anyone who remembers the end of The Spanish Prisoner (“Look at this. This book. Look, you got fingerprints all over this book. Fingerprints!” Repeat ad nauseum) may well be hesitantly – because they want, like I do, to forgive this flaw – asking themselves why a Swedish news crew just happens to be wandering, unaccompanied, the tarmac of an airfield in Dubai in the middle of the night.
But perhaps I’ve said too much.