| for Tribune : book review : David Mamet : BAMBI VS GODZILLA : [6/10] |
|
|
| Sunday, 22 July 2007 | |
 "You wanted to go through the looking glass. How was it? Was it more fun than miniature golf?" This is just one of many great lines from the most recent film written and directed by David Mamet, the tough, twisty, 24-ish drama Spartan (2004) - starring Val Kilmer and Mamet regular William H Macy. Never heard of it? Well, as seasoned Hollywood observer Brian Tallerico put it at the time, this was "a film the studio wanted to get off its schedule as quickly as possible... horribly mis-marketed by Warner Brothers from day one. The studio clearly had no idea how to advertise this intelligent, adult thriller, so they dumped it." In Britain, it lasted about a week in "selected" multiplexes (none between Sheffield and Edinburgh) - a decidedly cruel fate for what's by some measure the best of the five Mamet-directed films I've seen: namely his intriguing debut House of Games, the uneven Homicide, the silly The Spanish Prisoner and the unspeakably dire State and Main (he's also responsible for Things Change, Oleanna and The Winslow Boy.) Spartan belatedly suggested that Mamet might be able to manage the tricky feat of translating his considerable creative gifts - the ones that have made him arguably the USA's most acclaimed, revered, admired living playwright - into the medium of cinema. It's somewhat disappointing - if, given Spartan's circumstances, hardly astonishing - to realise that, fully three years down the line, he hasn't made another movie. Instead, the ever-industrious Mamet has concentrated on his other trades: theatre (Romance; The Voysey Inheritance), TV (The Unit), and working on essay-collections: 2006's The Wicked Son : Anti-Semitism, Self-hatred, and the Jews, and now Bambi vs Godzilla. As mentioned in the volume's prefatory small print, it's based partly on a series of articles Mamet wrote for the Guardian from 2003, and takes its title from a piece published in Harper's magazine in June 2005. Over the course of eight sections (which bear titles such as "The Screenplay", "Technique" and "Genre") and forty-odd shortish chapters, Mamet guides us through the "looking-glass" and into the innermost workings of "the movie business" in general and Hollywood in particular. Given the way Spartan was so egregiously mishandled by Warners, one would expect Mamet to be furiously scathing about the studios and their fabled 'system'. And - although several of these pieces were written before the Spartan debacle, he indeed pulls few punches in his condemnation of current structure of mainstream cinema - even as early as the book's introduction: "Films, which began as carnival entertainments merchandising novelty, seem to have come full circle," he laments. Later he notes (in a typical, incongruous mix of blunt outrage and Edwardian-country-lady vocabulary) that "Life in Hollywood seems to have ground to a standstill. We have fewer and fewer films, and these are of diminishing worth and ever-inflated production costs. It is enough to drive one to the fainting couch." This diagnosis won't come as a surprise to anyone who keeps abreast of the fare to be found in multiplexes on either side of the Atlantic: 2007's is proving yet another dispiriting sequel-dominated, kiddie-oriented summer, with David Fincher's unashamedly brainy Zodiac perhaps the only chink of light in the gloom. And Mamet, who has experience on many different kinds of productions in his capacity as writer-for-hire (Hannibal; The Untouchables; Oscar-nominated novel-adaptations Wag the Dog and The Verdict), would seem ideally place to diagnose exactly what's gone wrong and why, and how, and what we can do about it. Except Bambi vs Godzilla only occasionally addresses these core issues and even then is scrupulously careful not to name any names. .  Instead, this is a ragbag of trenchantly-expressed viewpoints on a wide range of subjects, many of them only tangentially connected with cinema's current malaise. As a compendium of punchy wisdom ("as the ancient law has it, if you want a difficult job done, give it to a lazy man"), snappy aphorisms ("all combat takes place at night, in the rain, at the intersection of four map segments") and sage apercus ("The McCarthy era ran quite a bit of the show business out of show business, and we were left with Pillow Talk") the book amply justifies what we might call its "admission price". The bite-sized chapters make it ideal dip-in-and-out reading, perhaps at bedtime or in the smallest room of the house.Read in orthodox start-to-finish fashion, however, Bambi vs Godzilla proves less of a rewarding experience. The journalistic origins of the collection become increasingly apparent - as when chapters separated by only a dozen or say almost identical things about Celia Johnson's performance in In Which We Serve, while Mamet's default tone - smart-alecky, arch, know-all, seen-all - while entertaining in short bursts, soon grows hectoring and tiresome. For a bloke supposedly dedicated to simplicity and directness, he doesn't half have a fondness for prissy, arcane vocabulary (degrady, pablum, appurtenant, maculate, etc.) Of course, if you must use these kinds of obscure terms, you really have to use them correctly - (Mamet goofs by using "adumbrage to" when it should be of.) There's some irony in the fact that the book is dedicated to Mamet's longtime (film) editor Barbara Tulliver, as editing isn't the strong suit of Bambi vs Godzilla: among the minor flubs to have slipped through the radar are typos like "sychophantic"; actress Beulah Bondi's first name spelled two different ways on the same page and an index reference to Robert 'Zemekis' (actually Zemeckis). Jane Eyre's famed "Reader, I married him" is cited as a great closing line from literature (whereas in fact it's the opening of a chapter); we're asked "In [sic] what could a graduate course in screenwriting consist?", and Mamet then refers to a "suppository" graduate school (a 'fundamental' error indeed.) On a wider level, every time Mamet makes some sparkling point about art, life and/or cinema ("dialogue and camera angles [are] the only two aspects of a screenplay actually of use"), any reader who has seen more than a couple of his films may find a nagging voice inside their head asking what kind of brass neck it takes to dream up with tosh like The Spanish Prisoner and State and Main, and then come over so magus-like in print. As David Thomson said of earlier Mamet essay-collections: "he offers his authority as earned the hard way and beyond dispute. But I wonder how he gets away with it." Here he sometimes doesn't: the latter sections are prone to turning into unfortunate slabs of unfocussed, self-indulgent verbiage - the chapter 'The Critic and the Censor' is Mamet at his stodgiest, most needlessly convoluted. This is a shame, because there's ample evidence that Mamet has the makings of a cracking writer about cinema - or rather, about the individual films themselves. He's a self-confessed "besotted movie-lover", and while some may question his taste (he straight-facedly names both Whale Rider and Galaxy Quest as "great" films), there's no mistaking his passionate ardour as he waxes enthusiastic over such diverse fare as The Diary of Anne Frank, Circle of Danger, The Friends of Eddie Coyle and The Jolson Story. He's even better when it comes to identifying and writing about great movie acting - indeed, one would pay decent money for a book entirely consisting of Mamet's recollections of his favourite performances. Bambi vs Godzilla might at least prove a small step in that direction - and yes, on reflection, it is more fun than miniature golf. Neil Young 27th June, 2007 written for the current issue of Tribune magazine Bambi vs Godzilla : On the Nature, Purpose and Practice of the Movie Business by David Mamet 272pp; published in the UK by Simon & Schuster (paperback) £12.99 
|
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
