State and Main

The filmmakers who invade Vermont are patronizing, condescending and pig-headed...to the locals and to each other. Writer-director David Mamet gets in some good acerbic digs at show business and isn't afraid to make anyone and everyone look the fool. After all, it's only "just a movie" to us--to them, it's brain surgery at a cost. The cast seems to be having a great time, Alec Baldwin in particular. Philip Seymour Hoffman has never been so benign--and thats a good thing (what a nice change to see him relaxed, romantic and clean-cut). The picture isn't a barn-burner, it never crackles or builds comedic momentum like, say, "Tootsie", but it's a flip, funny, unfettered throwaway. **1/2 from ****

David Mamet's `State and Main' is what `Our Town' might have been had it been conceived by a clear-eyed, modern day cynic. In this tale, a Hollywood film crew invades the idyllic hamlet of Waterford, Vermont, determined to capture on celluloid the simple bucolic virtues of a bygone era. The only problem is that those involved with the making of this film-within-a-film lack the requisite innocence themselves to do justice to the theme they purport to be exploring. They are all typical products of the crass Hollywood culture – boorish, self-obsessed and thoroughly amoral. All except the writer of the piece that is, Joseph Turner White (played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman), the one character who is not only in touch with his cravings for a return to innocence, but who passes the moral test laid out for him along those lines at the end.

`State and Main' is a clever film, a cute film, a likable film – it just isn't a very FUNNY film. The Mamet specialty – flat, monotone, emotionless line readings – becomes grating and irritating after awhile. Both the small town rubes and the big city elitists come across as little more than tired stereotypes who really don't have anything particularly funny to say. As a result, most of the attempts at humor simply fall flat. We've seen these characters and situations countless times before – the temperamental star making exorbitant financial demands, the lecherous leading man endangering the production with his reckless sexual dalliances, the harried producers and directors fighting a constant transcontinental phone battle with demanding studio heads `back on the coast.' And it just isn't all that interesting. Part of the problem, I think, is that Mamet never really exploits or explores the setting he's chosen. Most of the townsfolk emerge as minor, background characters at best, with the possible exception of Rebecca Pidgeon as Annie, Joe's eventual love interest. Pidgeon, who looks uncannily like Marlo Thomas in her `That Girl' days, seems sweet as all get out, but the atonal delivery of most of her lines hampers the interest we might otherwise find in her character. Actually, none of these characters are very interesting – or very funny. In fact, most of them seem rather pathetic when you get right down to it, and Mamet fails to provide the satirical wit and bite that would mitigate some of their unpleasantness. He doesn't generate the kind of out-and-out, hearty laughter that Christopher Guest derived from his examinations of rural America in movies like `Waiting For Guffman' and `Best of Show.' Mamet's take is, in many ways, so cynical that he seems to have forgotten to engender the kind of affection for his people that helps keep condescension at bay. Or, perhaps, it is really so much simpler than that – maybe he merely neglected to write any truly funny material this time around.

Rebecca Pidgeon (Mamet's wife) has never been so winsome, nor Philip Seymour Hoffman so innocent. It is light fare, but the dialogue, thanks to Mamet's talent, nonetheless has an edge and intelligence missing from most romantic comedies.

The Hollywood crew, post-Entourage, seems almost dated, though David Paymer does a good job of seeming tough while remaining surprisingly vulnerable. Clark Gregg, on the town side, does an under-appreciated job of playing the jilted fiancé and future corrupt politician.

Contrasting this 10-year-old film with nonsense like (500) Days of Summer, you can see the difference between good light comedy and bad light comedy. Pidgeon and Hoffman at least hint at complexities of character that make their relationship an interesting prospect.

A Hollywood cast and crew cynically invade a small New England town and leave some changes behind. A well done smooth flowing film which satirizes the impressionable citizens and will give most viewers some laughs about how easily some people can be impressed by the Hollywood experience. Very good performances all around led by William Macy and a noteworthy verbal tour de force by David Paymer.

Well worth watching.

***-Three Stars

In the pantheon of David Mamet's films, I'd say State and Main ranks somewhere in the middle, but it's a good middle. The rhythm and pace is more like a sitcom than a feature film, sharply edited and light on its feet and with a sort of whitebread jazz motif loitering in the background, but the cast is certainly above average, and Mamet's screenplay is very charming punctuated with some funny sub-plots and a few very good (maybe even great) one-liners.

The story concerns a film production crew, running out of money, who blows into the quaint provincial town of Waterford, Vermont on a location shoot after getting run out of New Hampshire (for reasons that are very hush-hush). The wellspring of much of the humor is in the byplay between the corruptness of the film people and the "purity" of the locals, who turn out to be as rotten as some of the Hollywood crowd. There are also some hilarious insides on the world of show-biz and film-making (i.e. the associate producer's credit, the product placement for a dot.com in a movie set in the 1800's, the cinematographer who can't get the shot he wants, Sarah Jessica Parker's character who finds religion and won't show her breasts in the film - unless the producers pay her an additional 800 grand).

Mamet is not quite in the Woody Allen class of gagwriting, but he proves to be assured and witty without being too self-consciously clever (as he is in "Heist"). Some favorite lines: "I remember my lines. I just don't remember which order they come in."; "You don't like children, do you?" "Never saw the point of 'em."; and, of course "Whatever happened to 1975?"

William H. Macy gives a good funny performance as the wheeler-dealer director (as good as his work in "Fargo" or "The Cooler"), and Philip Seymour Hoffman and Rebecca Pidgeon are wonderful as the would-be lovers. This is a not great, but a good middlebrow satire of different worlds, very pleasant and expertly written, though just not savage enough to be brutally memorable. 3 *** out of 4