In David Mamet's waggish 1994 essay, Gems from a Gambler's Bookshelf, he writes of passing away the days of early adulthood at a Chicago poker table. Years into the daily ritual, when Mamet told his tough-guy union lawyer father he was off to yet another poker game, the old man replied cryptically: "You still using cards?"
In time, Mamet says, he recognized this is what his father meant: "Do you still require the artificial constrictions of a self-delimiting game? . . . Can you not see that the Game goes on around you all the time?" In the guise of poker, the Game is a group activity pitting individuals against each other in a formalistic, rules-oriented battle to the death (or bankruptcy) that involves chance, timing, temerity, mental acuity and a talent for dishonesty known as bluffing. Of course, poker is just one of the Game's manifestations.
The notion of the Game is so pervasive in Mamet's universe that you can't help but wonder if he's always at play, practising some verbal or physical sleight-of-hand to throw potential opponents perpetually off-balance.
With this in mind, we turn to the stocky writer-director's physical appearance at a recent interview in New York to discuss his confident and winsome smart-bomb satire of the filmmaking industry, State and Main, which opens Friday.
A man-about-town on the streets of his native Chicago and New York City, Mamet now divides his time between Vermont and Cambridge, Mass., and it is the fashions of those places that he reflects now. What else but a desire to cultivate an impression of backwoods Vermont yokel could account for the dark blue suspenders he wears against a black crew-neck sweatshirt? How to square the white sweatsocks thrust into black loafers? And what's up with that absurd pair of elephantine eyeglasses, twin transparent satellite dishes that dwarf their host and leave little room for anything but eyebrows arching querulously above?
"Hullo, I'm Dave Mamet," he begins, still entering the room. This is delivered in a low, unassuming mumble while a weak half-handshake is offered. Passive-aggressive misdirection? Perhaps; it is certainly unexpected from a man known for his ferocious, frequently foul-mouthed macho characters and a love of sport shooting. It is equally unusual coming from one of America's premier men of letters, a jobbing scribe who is equally comfortable as a novelist, essayist, drama teacher, playwright, screenwriter, film director and poet who always insists on an actor's absolute fidelity to his words.
Mamet's love of a con runs through many of his films. His mannered directorial debut, House of Games, was an exercise in confidence-game construction. It later gave way to the smoother con of The Spanish Prisoner. Glengarry Glen Ross (directed by James Foley from a script by Mamet, based on his Pulitzer-winning play) portrayed a pressure-cooker real-estate office engaged in blithe swindles. The film for which Mamet is perhaps best known, Wag the Dog, features a con perpetrated on the entire American population. Though State and Main is his most genial and funniest film to date, it too rests on a series of small cons.
In the picture, long-time Mamet friend William H. Macy ( Fargo, Oleanna) plays Walt Price, a film director who arrives in small-town Vermont already running out of time and money to keep his production on its feet. He must deal with a lascivious leading man with an affinity for underage girls (Alec Baldwin), a leading lady who has just decided she won't show her breasts on screen despite her explicit contract (Sarah Jessica Parker), an accomplished playwright conflicted about whoring himself by writing movies (Philip Seymour Hoffman), and a local politician who believes Hollywood should pay a percentage of the gross for the privilege of filming in his town.
Mamet's wife Rebecca Pidgeon also stars as a sweet-natured bookshop owner falling for the Mamet stand-in, Hoffman's put-upon playwright-turned-screenwriter. (It's her fourth appearance in one of his films.)
While they all pursue their cons, Mamet is working his own on the audience.
"Good drama depends on misdirection," he explains. "[Film]executives think they can get involved with drama, because they understand all the things that need to be set up: We hate him, we love him, blah blah blah. Well, duh. A dog can understand that. The difficult part is to give the audience information while distracting them, so they're involved in the drama rather than just the recipient of a lecture.
"In that way, a good drama and a good magic trick -- and a joke for that matter -- and a confidence game are structured identically. You're leading the audience along to a revelation, as Aristotle told us, which is both surprising and inevitable."
After that explanation, Mamet hides back in his shell. A conversation with him is like trying to lure a wolf away from guarding its pup. He'll pace back and forth, watching for a moment of weakness, but he won't lunge until he feels he or his territory is threatened.
At one point, I suggest State and Main takes a cynical view of the filmmakers. "Well, they're depraved," he deadpans. But cynical? He attacks.
"I'll tell you what I think is cynical. I think it's cynical to make a nice comedy about nice people doing nice things. I think that's the act of a cynic," he says, tight and low, "because it's not true. And also because it's depriving the audience and the filmmaker of the wonderful, God-given release of the theatre.
"We need to go laugh at things, make fun of ourselves, say what you can't say. To do that is a very affirmative action."
The shorthand on Mamet, what everyone knows even if they don't know Mamet, is that he writes brutal, scurrilous, uniquely rhythmical dialogue full of mannered speech and stutters.
Like the British playwright John Osborne, Mamet's aesthetic influence through plays such as American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross was revolutionary. Yet in many ways he is unusually old-fashioned.
His behaviour with strangers is polite, unassuming and almost courtly. There is a strong moral streak in all of his work, though it is not moralistic. As early as his 30s, he was adopting the stance of a wise curmudgeon, voicing a strong preference for tradition.
At 53, that affinity for tradition is finding him returning to Judaism, which he initially ignored. He studies the Talmud (though that could be mere intellectual curiosity; he also cites the Koran in conversation).
Pidgeon, who married him in 1991 after his divorce to actress Lindsay Crouse, converted to Judaism. Their two children are being raised as Jews and she is now, he says with grudgingly expressed delight, trying to turn their home kosher.
Yes, even David Mamet eventually mellows.
A few years ago, he wrote a scathing essay entitled The Jew For Export, in which Mamet called Schindler's List "emotional pornography" and "just another instance of abuse," of Jews. "Today, I don't think I'd write that essay, because I don't doubt that [Steven]Spielberg was doing as he thought right," he says. And where he once decried the death of Broadway, for example, he no longer seems worried about the state of American theatre.
Sure, Broadway is a theme park for tourists, but "theatre does seem to be springing up in new places," he says, turning reflective again. "Things change. Look at Broadway. Fifty years ago they would say, 'How terrible, here we have 25-storey buildings. When I was a kid there were brownstones.' Well, hell, there are now 70-storey buildings and when I was a young fella' there were 20-storey buildings. Life goes on."