GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS
A film review by Frank Maloney
Copyright 1992 Frank Maloney
GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS is a film directed by James Foley, from a script by David Mamet, based on Mamet's play of the same name. It stars Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Ed Harris, Alan Arkin, Kevin Spacey, with Alec Baldwin and Jonathan Pryce. Photography by Juan Ruiz Anchiaad and music by James Newton Howard. Rated R, due to rough language.
GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS won David Mamet a Pulitzer nine years ago. Mamet has written the screenplay for the movie version in which he has preserved the nervy, shorthand rhythms of the salesmen. It is the dialog, faultlessly executed, the choppy interplay of half-developed ideas and over-repeated assertions that captures the panic, desperation, and limitations of the characters and their hapless lives.
In the process, Mamet has added a new character, played by Alec Baldwin, whose function is to clarify the situation for the audience, and several new scenes. The movie also benefits from the canny direction of James Foley, the expressionistic photography of Juan Ruiz Anchiaad, and the jazzy background music of James Newton Howard. But mostly, of course, the film luxuriates in the presence of one of the most impressive ensemble casts of U.S. male actors assembled for one film in many years.
In speaking of the actors, one hardly knows where to begin. Perhaps with the team acting of Alan Arkin as the lost, unnerved George Aaronow, and Ed Harris, as the poison-spewing Dave Moss. Their verbal pas de deux, in the salesmen's lounge, in a car, in the Imperial-red Chinese restaurant, despite the anger, the desperation, become an esoteric comedy act, a kind of high-level "Who's on First" routine piped through a Gatling gun. Staccato bursts of such complete understanding that conventional sentences are no longer required alternate with deceit, revelations, and the inability to understand simple assertions. These are men whose lives are based on playing fast and loose with both language and truth, whose every utterance is laced with meanings accessible only to the cognoscenti.
Then there's Kevin Spacey as the ice-cold John Williamson, the office manager, the go-fer for the unseen Mitch and Murray who own this seedy little sales office under the elevated train tracks. Williamson hands out the hot leads to the closers and recycles the cold ones to the salesmen who aren't. He's the hitman, the executioner, who is willing to commute the sentence only for a sizable bribe. He is universally hated and reviled because he is not a salesman, he's a bureaucrat, not a "man in a man's business." The issue of manhood, which is central to GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS, is particularly focused on the character of Williamson. Spacey reads the role perfectly, thawing out only at the prospect of bribery or revenge, like any spoiled, sulky child.
Williamson's role as executioner is aided and abetted by the unnamed character played by Alec Baldwin. Baldwin appears in one scene only, a scene written for the movie, a sales meeting in which the desperate situation is outlined clearly and mercilessly. Baldwin flaunts his BMW, his Rolex, his income, his brass testicles (one wonders whom he castrated to get them) taunts the failing salesmen as queers and otherwise impugns their "manhood." He struts, threatens, insults, patronizes, and does a riveting job of exemplifying, of symbolizing, the worst of free enterprise as dining with cannibals: eat or be eaten is the only rule.
Al Pacino plays Ricky Roma the only success in this hellish office. His control of language, his ability to mimic language, to mimic meaning, in his sales rap has put him on top, made him the prince of the hour. Pacino's scene in the glowing red interior of the restaurant qua Inferno with Jonathan Pryce, his next victim, is a dizzying mix of obfuscation masked as candor, of a parody of "male bonding," of words without meaning, of courtship and seduction, and booze and smarmy malice slippery as an iceberg in an oil slick
Pryce himself delivers what may well be the most amazing performance in a film that is virtually defined by remarkable performances. First as the dazzled mark and then as the apologetic, wife-driven backslider, Jonathan Pryce displays an amazing range of emotions on his rubbery face that suffuse it in the rapid, smooth, transparent successions of color-switching octopus. He has to get out of the deal, but in doing so he is also driven to apologize for letting Roma down, in another statement on the absurdity and touching sentimentalism of male friendships.
Finally, a word of praise for Jack Lemmon as Shelly "the Machine" Levine. The rumpled, wrinkled duffle bag of better times, down on his luck, unable to sell his worthless properties, his daughter in the hospital, the money for special care running out, desperate for a taste of that old success that won him his now too-ironic nickname -- all these Lemmon captures with a veteran grace and effortlessness in the kind of performance that would have won him a knighthood, were he a British actor. We sympathize with Shelly without liking or approving of him and his scams, such is the skill that Lemmon brings to his part.
What's it all about, I asked myself and my friend, whose reviews also appear on the net from time to time, as we exited the film. The ending is desultory at best, not satisfying dramatically and is perhaps is a little disorienting, distracting. The foci of the script seem to be twofold: a critique of capitalism and free enterprise and a dual attack on and an encomium to a world of men, maleness, and machismo. How do the two interact? What is the influence of the shark-pack pressures of having to be always closing on the natural friendships of men? Were these men corrupted by the system? They don't see themselves as corrupt; Roma, I think it is, says "We're salesmen, not thieves."
Yes, well, that is the question, ain't it? Salesmen are men who sell, what they sell is hardly relevant. Mamet is not about to have one idea about any large subject. His world is one of conflict, mixed emotions, and ambiguity. It would be a distortion, I think, to say that Mamet wants us to react to his themes in any one way. Much more likely, he wants us to become sensitized to the complexities and moral ambiguities, to say that there is conflict in our values, to see the good and ill of basic things.
The comparisons for GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS are usually in the criticism I've read so far with DEATH OF A SALESMAN. Without getting an extended digression of about similarities and differences, the film I kept thinking about was TIN MEN, Barry Levinson's second Baltimore film, about aluminum-siding salesmen. Willy Loman is not the type for The Machine, instead Shelly Levine seems a lot more like Danny DeVito's character, an honest thief, a manly man doing manly work, if only the powers that be would let him.
I recommend GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS for anyone with an appetite for a serious film, intensely dramatic, darkly comic, and for some of the finest film acting one is going to encounter this year. Well worth full ticket price to the right film-goer. But if the f-word bothers you, please stay away; the language is strictly barracks-level in this regard.
-- Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney
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