Sarah Jessica Parker and Alec Baldwin.
Small town makes for difficult shooting.
That's pretty wishful thinking. Actually, State doesn't even have the consistent incisiveness or perfect pitch of Mamet's cowritten script for Wag the Dog , which watched Hollywood and Washington co-opt each other. When he wrote State last year, even Mamet couldn't have imagined that one deadpan exchange about the Electoral College would turn into the movie's most explosive laugh. Yet as these showbiz folk soon discover, Waterford proves to be equally resourceful. Unfortunately, for all its buoyant promise, State 's helium balloon begins to sink somewhere past the movie's middle section.