From: frankm@microsoft.com (Frank R.A.J. Maloney)
Subject: GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS
Date: 04 Oct 92 18:23:13 GMT
Organization: Microsoft Windows/DOS Users Ed Group

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 cognescenti.

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 apolegetic, 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
hopsital, 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 gettting an extended
digression of about similarities and differences, the film I kept
thinking about was THE TINMEN, 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
	"Well, I'm a little muddled." -- Glinda
Xref: sparky rec.arts.movies:29396 alt.cult-movies:8651