In David Mamet’s blistering 2007 essay collection on the
praetorian nature of Hollywood, Bambi vs. Godzilla, the Pulitzer
Prize-winning playwright and idiosyncratic filmmaker dedicated a
chapter to deconstructing the testosterone-addled action film,
excoriating its black and white moral lessons and the audience’s
eagerness to accept such lessons unconditionally.
“If the violence can be construed as just, our perverse
entertainment is less despicable,” Mamet lamented, eventually
raising his broadside against action films to a societal critique,
claiming glorified screen violence has “infected and perverted
American foreign policy” and attacking the “misconceived false
antisepsis of the Vietnam air war, of Grenada, of Iraq I and II” as
revealing “an impunity like that of the moviegoer.”
Lord! Whether the average fan of Steven Segal or Dwayne “The
Rock” Johnson would take umbrage at having “misconceived false
antisepsis” of the government laid at the feet of their
movie-watching habits is an open question, but the sacred cow
premise the director sought to slay, on the other hand, is a
beloved American institution:
The viewer is presented with this paradigm: The hero
(i.e., you, the viewer, whom he represents) is good. The
hero will undergo various struggles in which you, the viewer, will
be able to enjoy vicariously his stoicism while undergoing no pain.
Your desire to do violence will be pandered to by an
incontrovertible presentation of the justice of the hero’s cause
and by a (ritual) period of initial restraint on his part. This
false glow of untried and (in the case of the moviegoer) proxy
triumph is the drug of the bully. It seduces the weak-minded and
emboldens the arrogant.
Ironic, then, that Mamet’s latest film
Redbelt proves so spectacularly successful at
providing its audience an opportunity to vicariously enjoy the
struggles and eventual proxy triumph of a stoic and good hero.
That’s no minor subplot, either. At times this beautifully executed
film, a tale of resistance to corruption set against the backdrop
of a Mixed Martial Arts scene slowly losing its innocence to
outsiders seeking to co-opt its philosophy for personal gain, feels
like a slightly higher-brow version of the classic work of the
undisputed master of the proletarian purity-vs.-corruption fight
film, John G. Avildsen, the man who brought
Rocky,
The
Karate Kid and
The Power of One so vividly to life.
Redbelt is still classic Mamet, to be sure, with the
requisite poetically off-kilter dialogue, turn-on-a-dime plot
twists and familiar ensemble cast. There has, however, been an
undeniable shift in thematic approach. Compare this paragraph from
a recent New York Times piece in which Mamet unpacked his reasons for making the film to the one
above from Bambi vs. Godzilla:
Fight films are sad. There is nobility in effort, in
discipline and, if not in suffering, in trying to live through
suffering and endeavor to find its meaning. “Redbelt,” generically,
is a fight film. The martial art film is about opposing strength to
strength: two humans compete, and we are allowed to root for the
underdog and enjoy his final victory. But the fight film is a
celebration of submission, which is to say, of loss. As such, it
finds itself on the outskirts of my beloved genre of film noir. The
punchline of drama is “Isn’t life like that….” But its elder
brother, tragedy, is the struggle of good against evil, of man
against the gods. In tragedy, good, and the gods, are proclaimed
winners; in film noir, which is tragedy manque, the gods still win,
but good’s triumph gets an asterisk.
The difference between being “allowed to root for” and “enjoy
vicariously” is semantic at best. Such an ostentatious display of
righteous violence “construed as just,” from a pure hero and
presented as noble in the final third of
Redbelt
apparently suggests a turn toward the tragic, and with it a
presumably less morally ambiguous Mamet.
DURING THE POST-SCREENING Q&A with Mamet after the
Redbelt premiere in Manhattan, the director explained he
saw the film as the story of “a lone man” — Mike Terry (Chiwetel
Ejofor) — “who has to take his purity into a very messy world.”
Indeed, at the beginning of Redbelt, Terry survives by
reputation alone. It is only when financial pressure and personal
calamity force him beyond dojo walls that things begin to fall
apart and treachery suddenly becomes inexplicably omnipresent.
Still, one would have to be mostly ignorant of the breadth of
Mamet’s work or, at the very least, unable to get beyond the themes
of the endlessly parsed Glengarry Glen Ross to contend
pure characters are an entirely new development for the man. Gino,
the Italian-American cobbler mistaken for a gangster in Mamet’s
most underrated film, the sublime Things Change, is as
innocent as a newborn. The entire basis of The Winslow Boy
is a father willing to lose everything to defend the honor of his
young son falsely accused of theft. A fetching small town Vermonter
played by Mamet’s wife Rebecca Pidgeon fights superficial Hollywood
types for the soul of a writer on the verge of selling out in
State and Main. (“Go you Huskies!”)
Redbelt nevertheless does feel like a
departure, perhaps because protagonists in those Mamet films that
feature violence or predatory behavior are invariably tarnished by
the socially deviant muck they are thrashing around in. Mamet
characters in such works frequently wise up to the realities of the
world — but hardly ever evolve into better people. Mike Terry is
not perfect, of course, and when discussing the character at the
premiere Mamet half-jokingly invoked an old Jewish maxim, “If you
don’t know what to atone for, look at your good deeds.” It’s true.
The road to Mike’s Hell was certainly paved with good
intentions.
Yet Mike does not wise up and lose faith in a code that is
failing him, but, rather, develops a stronger, more nuanced
definition of honor in line with what James Bowman described in his
seminal book Honor: A History as “the good opinion of the
people who matter to us, and who matter because we regard them as a
society of equals who have the power to judge our behavior.” He
realizes, as Bowman notes, “By their nature, group loyalties will
sometimes conflict with loyalties to a wider community and to
absolute principles, which is why it is useful to distinguish
between honor and ethics.”
It is in this “distinguishing” that Mike ultimately achieves a
more transcendental understanding of honor and his principles: He
abhors and has always eschewed competitive fights, believing such
spectacles denigrate the art and philosophy of jiu-jitsu. But what
if such a fight becomes the only way to defend the honor of the art
or those you love? “A man distracted is a man defeated,” Terry
tells his students, but it isn’t until he is broken completely down
that he realizes he has been distracted by the very methods he
believed kept him clear.
NO DOUBT THE ELEPHANT in this review is Mamet’s essay “Why I am No
Longer a Brain Dead Liberal,” published last March in the The
Village Voice, which has engendered much glee on the right and
consternation on the left. When asked point blank at the Manhattan
premiere, however, whether Redbelt could be “read
politically,” Mamet shot back, “It can, but what can’t?” The
director went on to add the post-9/11 zeitgeist was such that
issues of politics and war inevitably color artistic endeavors, but
that he had never gone out of his way to shoehorn politics into his
work — “because that’s not my place.”
Predictably, this attitude is hardly enough to shield his work
from politically uncharitable interpretations. A New York
Press reviewer, for example, fumed that “Mamet’s own
hyper-capitalist arrogance confuses movie art with
tendentiousness,” while Ben Kenigsberg opened his Time Out New
York review with the following line: “After torturous screeds
on Hollywood doublespeak, the present state of self-hating Judaism
and his own abdication of ‘Brain dead’ liberalism, David Mamet
officially exceeds his quota of permissible bulls—t for this
decade with this preposterous new shell game…” It went downhill
from there.
Interviews with Mamet, however, are filled with his insistent
refrain that he sees one of the primary responsibilities of a good
writer is to not be predictable. Mamet’s work and career bear this
out: He has a unique, recognizable, sui generis style, but
— with the possible exception of his con game films — it has
always been widely employed. Although changes in perspective are
likely to affect one’s art, recently Mamet took to the pages of
Playboy to herald the lost arts of “rowdyism,” “high spirits,” and
the martial art of jiu-jitsu, which he has been practicing for
several years now.
“In the boxing and the wrestling rings or on the football
field,” Mamet wrote, “we learned that getting hurt was not the same
as dying, that in order to make one’s point, sometimes it is
necessary to put something at risk, that there is such a thing as
will, and that often it will, as Kipling told us, win out
when heart and nerve and sinew are gone.”
It would have been safe and predictable to make another heist
film. It would have been safe and predictable to load a movie down
with politics his old and new admirers alike are probably scouring
Redbelt for. Instead, Mamet had the will to take a risk,
and though Redbelt adopts a different thematic and
structural tack than his previous work, it pays off with a vital
and compelling film that will both compliment and stand out from
his already legendary body of work.
