From: frankm@microsoft.com (Frank R.A.J. Maloney)
Subject: REVIEW: GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS
Reply-To: frankm@microsoft.com (Frank R.A.J. Maloney)
Organization: Microsoft Corp., Redmond WA
Date: Mon, 5 Oct 1992 18:22:43 GMT
Followup-To: rec.arts.movies
Summary: r.a.m.r. #01563
Keywords: author=Maloney

			     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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