STATE AND MAIN --------------
After getting unceremoniously thrown out of the state of New Hampshire, the Hollywood cast and crew of "The Old Mill" descend upon Waterford, Vermont, largely on the merits of its authentic old mill and firehouse. Screenwriter Joseph Turner White (Philip Seymour Hoffman) will face a crisis of conscience when he's asked to lie about witnessing the presence of an underage local in star Bob Barrenger's (Alec Baldwin) car at an accident at "State and Main."
LAURA:
Writer/director David Mamet takes a pot shot at Hollywood corruption with his latest, "State and Main." While his screenplay features many pithy lines (usually coming from the director/producer due of William H. Macy and David Paymer), "State and Main" plays pretty flat.
Director Walt Price (Mamet vet Macy) arrives with his signature cross stitched pillow ('Shoot first, ask questions later') and sets up camp. His and producer Marty Rossen's attitude is obviously condescending to the locals, who themselves are soon retaliating by filling Evian bottles with tap water. Soon they discover that the local, hoped for titular, old mill burned down years ago, their ever randy star is fooling around with the local deli guy's underage daughter (Julia Stiles, "Hamlet"), their female star, Claire Wellesley (Sarah Jessica Parker) is balking at nudity even though it's covered by her contract and the locals are all tied up in a local stage production and unavailable as extras.
The central focus of the story, though, is Mamet standin, screenwriter Joseph Turner White (Philip Seymour Hoffman), adapting his own play for the big screen for the first time. He meets local bookshop owner Ann Black (Rebecca Pidgeon, "The Winslow Boy" and Mamet's wife) who tries to keep him on a true course as he navigates the ways of Tinseltown while an innocent romance blooms.
Even as Mamet provides clever dialogue ('Everybody makes their own fun. If you don't make it, it's entertainment.' 'You believed that? It's so biased! So's our electoral process, but we still vote.') and situations (placing a computer product placement in a film set in 1895), his film never takes wing and flies. His oddly assembled cast runs the gamut from Macy, delivering his lines as if he were on stage instead of in a film, Seymour Hoffman, miscast as a naive romantic lead, and Alec Baldwin, convincing as a pampered star with a fixation on nubile young girls. Macy and Paymer enjoy repartee, but Hoffman and Pidgeon never really connect. A subplot where Mayor George Bailey (Charles Durning as the "It's a Wonderful Life" namesake) cowtows to the Hollywood celebrities in order to score a society dinner for his wife Sherry (Patti LuPone), so rife with comic possiblities, is just about abandoned. No effort is made to make the film-within-a-film appear the least bit interesting.
Technically the film is adequate. Overall, "State and Main" has the appearance of a film that was a lot more fun to make than it is to sit through.
C
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