GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS
A film review by Lon Ponschock
Copyright 1993 Lon Ponschock
Written by David Mamet From his play Directed by James Foley
When I first read GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS all of six years ago it had preceded such film events as WALL STREET and other films which, in the classic Hollywood patois "rips the lid off of business." Oh, yeah, I was working in a sales office at the time, so you may be able to appreciate my perspective on the play/film.
Mamet actually worked in a small real estate office such as the location in which the film takes place. And as with any film adaptation of a stage play, I think that the elements of the power of language captured on stage are diluted in the film presentation. Everyone wanted to be in this show. And the ones who made the cut are are; Jack Lemmon, Al Pacino, Alan Arkin, Alec Baldwin, and Ed Harris.
The film is denser with each viewing but the central element for me is this: GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS is a film about men. It is a film about men as you have probably not seen them before. What you see is the reason why the men women marry behave differently than women had always expected them to behave them in the home. The world of business teaches men to behave in a certain way: Alec Baldwin asks Jack Lemmon early in the picture if he has the guts to take people's money. If he has the balls. The office supervisor makes a gaffe during a meeting which Pacino has with his client Mr. Linkq (Jonathan Pryce) and Pacino asks him after he has committed his error, "Who told you you could work with men?" In the final moments of the film, Pacino as Ricky Roma says "This is no longer a world of men, it's a world of clock watchers. Where's the adventure?"
The premise of the film is this: the sales staff in a real estate office has to compete for the top position or be fired. The rest of the action follows. They are told this in a sales meeting by Alec Baldwin. The Pacino character is not present. He is at the bar across the road picking up a client. Yes, picking up a "john" in a bar to *sell him real estate*. This is brilliant: to see the mark and practice ABC: Always Be Closing. Idle conversation becomes an $80,000 sale of a piece of property in Florida.
GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS is an object lesson: be good, go to school, eat your Wheaties, become a computer technician, *do anything* but enter the world of men. And in this Mamet has crafted something that has not been seen before: a play about the powerlessness of men before their jobs, before their wives, before their responsibilities.
In the truest sense, it is a film for women to experience. If they have not understood it before, they can understand it now.
-- lon@edsi.plexus.com
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