Homicide

While this picture could compare favorably with many of its type for nothing more than its use of action, suspense and realistic details regarding police work, it goes significantly further and becomes a character study of a man searching for an identity. A conscientious, no-nonsense detective, Gold has never become involved in his work to the extent that it has made him question his values, let alone his reason for existing. Without the point being forced upon us, we see a character with (seemingly) no home, no friends, no social activities: a decent man who has not connected with anything meaningful in life until circumstances force him to make significant choices.

Especially challenging to the viewer is the deliberately ambiguous ending in which there is reason to believe that Gold could choose either of the major alternatives available to him. He looks and feels like an outsider in the precinct. He now identifies with the Jew as an outsider. Could it be that he is actually considering.....?

See this provocative picture, and decide for yourself. Excellent performances and direction throughout.

I found the film as riveting and disturbing as most of the other reviewers, but I'd like to comment here on David Mamet's writing style. As one of the earlier reviews points out, Mamet is much admired by the literati, and as another says, he is studied in film schools. So I may be going out on a limb, but I am a lot less impressed with his writing than most.

David Mamet started as a playwright, and he still writes with the theater in mind, even when he writes for movies or TV. I first noticed this a year or so ago when watching a rerun of Hill Street Blues for which he'd written the script. The show had many first-rate TV writers, and there was nothing incongruous in the idea that a celebrated playwright would write an episode. But his episode, while intense, involving, and philosophical in the approved Mamet style, proved out of place as an episode in a long-running series with established characters. Mamet's Hill Street bunch lost familiar character traits and gained others common to nearly all the dramatis personae of his plays. The cops all talked like Mamet characters, had macho-philosophical Mamet dialogues, faced Mamet moments of truth.

Well, here is Homicide, another cop show in full length movie form, and once again his puppets talk like Mamet characters, rather than like distinguishable individuals. These roles are his own creations, so he isn't confronted with a series-watcher's expectations, but that hasn't made them more believable as people. His dialogue has a sameness about it that suggests he doesn't really listen to the way people talk. (Again, I realize this is a minority view: critics are always writing about the "gritty realism" of his characters' speeches.)

Listen to the dialogue from one of the NYPD Blue episodes written by David Milch. (I choose Milch not only because he's one of Blue's best writers [and co-producer, of course] but also because he wrote many of the best Hill Street Blues episodes around the time Mamet wrote his contribution.) The characters are varied, and their choice of words tells the listener more about them as individuals with every line they speak. Mamet characters tend to tell you, not what they are like as people, but what Mamet wants you to think about them. Again and again during Homicide I found myself thinking: "no, he wouldn't say that", or even "does anybody really talk that way?"

Am I saying David Milch is a better writer than David Mamet? I think I am, for realistic media like TV and film, anyway. The theater, as an inherently artifical medium, can absorb and even thrive upon artificiality in its dialogue. But TV and movies have different demands, and I don't think David Mamet meets them very well.

Homicide detectives Bobby Gold (Joe Mantegna) and Tim Sullivan (William H. Macy) were taken off the case of Robert Randolph in favor of the FBI. The FBI fumbles the arrest. With mounting racial resentment, the mayor orders the cops to take him alive. Gold stumbles onto a murder of an old Jewish grandmother who ran a store in a black neighborhood. The rumor is that she kept a fortune in the basement. The Jewish family uses their political influence to get Gold as the investigator. Gold is frustrated at losing the Randolph case. He's also not a proud Jew and dismisses this case which would test his Jewish ethnicity.

It's David Mamet writing and directing. The dialogue has his mannered style. It's hard-boiled. The visual style is stark. Some of it is off-putting. He's hitting the Jew card very hard right from the start. It's unnecessary. The central concept is intriguing. However, little things keep annoying me. Gold's gun gets taken and fired by a prisoner but there is no investigation afterwards. It shouldn't be up to Gold. There is supposedly a gunman across the way but they don't close the curtains. There are little problems all the way to the end. The most problematic is that Gold's switch feels too abrupt. In fact, I figured he's lying to them to pump for information. In general, the movie doesn't feel natural. There is an intriguing idea but I can't completely buy it.

Bobby Gold, a jewish homicide detective involved in tracking down a cop killer, stumbles onto the shooting of an elderly jewish lady. Although starting only very reluctantly, he gets drawn deeper and deeper into this second case, eventually getting involved with a militant pro-Israel group which causes him to question his own identity as a Jew. This naturally leads to neglect of the first case. Bad things happen as a result.

If you like Mamet films, then you'll certainly enjoy this one. As is typical, his tight dialogue creates wonderful tensions with a minimum of words and the acting is excellent. Unfortunately, the movie fails to live up to its promise. Part of the blame is in a relatively weak finale and a conclusion which goes by so fast you'll miss it if you blink. The real problem, however, is that we never develop any intimacy with the human relationships and personal conflicts which should be the heart of the movie but instead just end up providing support for the actual events taking place. We should be leaving the theater with the story playing over and over in our minds for some time to come, but instead we leave simply having been entertained and enthralled for the duration of the film. Not a bad thing, but not as good as it could have been.

I am a huge fan of Mamet and there's an excellent cast - even the mighty Roger Deakins as DOP. But this movie doesn't work. The dialogue is stilted and forced - surely the last thing you'd expect from a Mamet script - the main character is weak and not credible as a detective. The plot is all over the place and the ending highly unsatisfactory.