Lakeboat

I found the movie "Lakeboat" to be a wonderful character driven film! The actors are superb, especially Robert Forster as the world-weary Joe Pitko! An Oscar performance if there ever was one. Some might find the language a bit "salty", but It wasn't gratuitous. Rather it reflects the way regular blue collar guys sometimes relate to each other, guys among guys. Having grown up and spent most of my life in the great-lakes area, I found that it rung true, and I thought it was explained very well to "the new guy" by his cabin mate before the voyage. If you don't mind thinking a bit, and you don't need an explosion every few minutes or huge special effects to keep your attention, I think you'll enjoy this film. It's a nice change of pace from the rat race.

Haven't seen the movie, but saw the play at the Goodman in Chicago years ago. Mamet was uncannily on target; I felt he knew my old crew mates inside and out. Other comments seem to evaluate the movie as entertainment or what they expect of Mamet, or some other side issue. How about evaluating it as TRUTH?! The lakeboats are all gone now. The Mesabi iron ore range in Minnesota is played out and South American steel has virtually killed the US steel industry. The ore boats no longer ply the lakes, and the last one, the Mather, is now a floating museum docked at Cleveland.

So the play catches a piece of American history recorded nowhere else. All that foul language; yep, it's right on! Don't like it? Then you don't like telling it like it is! (Pardon -- like it WAS!). Perhaps the movie has it's faults; I hear they forgot the delay between an engine room signal and the reply/confirmation. But reviewers who focus on the entertainment quality of the movie miss the point: it should be viewed as LIVING HISTORY!! (Alas, of an era now totally dead and gone).

In the Summer of 1950, fresh out of high school, I shipped out as a deckhand on the Samuel F. B. Morse one of the last wooden hatch boats, but got fired the next week because I was to weak to handle the huge wooden hatches. Later I shipped out September 6, 1950, on the Presque Isle, on a run from Cleveland to Escanaba, and stayed for the Fall months. The next Summer is was deckwatch on the James A Farrell.

It's all gone now, and David Mamet's play is the only record I've ever seen of what crew life was really like. Found the movie/play boring? crude? tedious? Right; now you know what life on the lakeboats was really like!!!

One would think that having worked with David Mamet for so many years, Joe Mantegna would have a superb understanding of Mamet-speak. Mamet's dialog requires a certain rhythm, or cadence to make it work, and despite the high caliber actors involved in this project, I didn't feel that many of them pulled it off very well. Denis Leary and Robert Forster seemed to get it, but everyone else around them seemed very stilted, and the dialog seemed truly forced. Mamet is fascinated by the dance of dialog, and if the cast won't dance, it doesn't work.

LAKEBOAT for some will move as slowly as one of those ore-carrying vessels you see on the horizon from the shores of the Great Lakes. But for those wanting a relief from the frenzy of the many mindless action movies clogging our cineplexes, this Joe Montegna-directed adaptation 0of a 30-year old David Mamet play offers plenty of rewards. Rather than a coming of age film, as I've seen it described, it's really a tale in which a young grad student named Dale (played by David Mamet's brother), working on an ore boat for the summer, serves as a witness to a number of middle-aged and older crew members intent on educating their young companion. Much of their advice about handling women and sex is pretty awful, but amusing in the cocksure way in which it is dispensed to Dale--and to their good intentions in "helping" the naive boy. Most poignant of the crew is the book-reading Joe, who reveals to Dale a fact about his early life that he's told no one else--that as a boy he had dreamt of being a ballet dancer. Thinking about the direction which he chose for his own life, he tells Dale not only that he has his whole life ahead of him, but, a wonderful comment coming from a rough-hewn crew member, that he is a good man and a hard worker. Charles Durning and George Wendt are delightful as the ponderous First Mate (Captain) and second in command, as is Peter Falk as a pier worker.It seems such a crime that this film came to the Cincinnati area for just a week with no fanfare and left as quietly as it came. It desrves to find an audience, so I hope it soon will be released as an affordable video.

I think you probably have to be a huge David Mamet fan to really love this film. I'm not a huge fan, although I also don't hate his works. As for this film, I liked it but didn't love it. The entire film was a character study, and I thought was well done -- mostly. With this cast, I don't think it could go wrong. Robert Forster was fantastic. Some of the humor fell flat for me. Still, I thought it was worth seeing. My grandfather used to work in large ships on the Great Lakes. That's mostly why I rented this film. Although I suspect that his own experiences were not much like this film, it was interesting to me to think that some of them may have been a little bit similar.