Homicide (1991)

reviewed by
Serdar Yegulalp

Homicide (1991)
* * * 1/2
A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp
Copyright 1998 by Serdar Yegulalp

CAPSULE: One of David Mamet's most underrated and unseen movies; a blunt-nosed and memorable story about a man waking up to the sound of his own soul.

The criminally underrated HOMICIDE is one of David Mamet's best movies. It is not as clever or devious as HOUSE OF GAMES or THE SPANISH PRISONER, but it strikes markedly different notes than either of those films. Among many other things, it's also one of the few recent movies that deals intelligently with the notion of ethnic identity and the subordination of same -- and the consequences of that subordination.

HOMICIDE features a cop, Bobby Gold (Joe Mantegna), who has tried to keep a great deal about himself on the back burner. He is a Jew, but he has developed a whole arsenal of reasons for closeting that part of himself away. Case in point: when another officer calls him a "kike", he flinches and cocks his fist, but we get the feeling that he's doing it more out of a sense of obligation. Someone calls you fighting words, you fight. HOMICIDE is not about the fight per se, but about the motives.

The plot centers around a candy-store murder. An old woman, the proprietrix, was shot dead in a robbery, and her son, a doctor, more or less drafts Gold into investigating the killing. The doctor assumes that Gold will give a damn by dint of his own Jewishness, but he doesn't. Or, more accurately, he tries not to, and has it blow up in his face. This is interwoven with another case that Gold is trying to work on -- a drug dealer on the run -- and, like Gold, we don't realize that he can't resolve either case without getting a few issues about himself straightened out.

The dialogue is vintage Mamet: fast, sharp, spattered with invectives and expletives, but always at the service of the story and the characters. There's one scene that perfectly dramatizes how ugly dialogue can be made to serve the larger purposes of a movie: Gold is on the phone, ranting about the fact that he's been yanked off the drug bust and put on this pathetic candy-store shooting. Out of his mouth emerge words that he would consider vile coming from anyone else, and it isn't until he's shown up later on that he realizes what he has done.

Mamet fills the production with a gallery of actors he's familiar with and lets them do their stuff, like jazz musicians who are in a tight ensemble together: William H. Macy, long one of my favorite actors; Mantegna; J.J. Barry, Ving Rhames. They all work, and they all convince us that there's a lot more going on here than is only hinted at on the surface. Especially in the case of Bobby Gold, who is a classic case of a man trying very hard not to know who he is. Then one fine day, he catches up with himself.

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