Men who swear by Mamet
It's not so surprising, really.
Celebrated hyphenate David Mamet - playwright, screenwriter, movie director, TV show creator, sometime actor, academic, author, essayist, etc. - had a fight film in him. Naturally it's a poetic-sounding one with perfect meter. But there's plenty of blood, too. No one walks away from Mamet's arena unscathed.
"Redbelt" focuses on the world of Brazilian jiu-jitsu fighters and promoters, but they're Mamet men just the same: down on their luck, desperate to turn around their circumstances, tough, foul-mouthed, highly moral or completely amoral, unwilling to budge from their principles or willing to do whatever it takes to make a buck. Those are ongoing refrains for Mamet, who has often focused on the vulgar and bruising. For example:
1. "GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS" The 1984 Pulitzer Prize-winning play and 1992 movie about the real estate business in Chicago strips off the spiffy-blazer veneer to reveal boiler room sales tactics and filth-talking salesmen who will do just about anything (deception, bribery, threats) to push undesirable property onto chump buyers.
2. "EDMOND" Eighty-eight minutes don't get much more agonizing than this 2006 movie based on an early 1980s play. The story of what befalls a man who walks out on his wife on a fortune teller's whim, it features racist chatter, sexual violence, beatings, even bloodier beatings, and an ending that makes men wince.
3. "HANNIBAL" In this 2001 sequel to "Silence of the Lambs" - one of the less personally driven of Mamet's films - a main character literally loses his head to Hannibal the Cannibal. Or at least the top of it. The eponymous lead saws it off in order to nibble on brains he fries at the supper table in front of his still-breathing victim. The rest of the film focuses on . . . well, who can remember anything after that.
4. "AMERICAN BUFFALO" This time out it's a coin shop owner, his young friend, and a paranoid braggart at the center of male misery as the men try to get back a buffalo nickel and, naturally, make a brutal mess of it. In the 1974 play/1996 movie, the Mamet signature is already strong: vulgar verbal twists, explosive violence, ugliness all around.
5. "HOMICIDE" The 1991 story of a Jewish homicide detective who falls in with a Zionist group while investigating a seemingly minor murder came under fire for its allegedly anti-Semitic self-loathing. But it's a Mamet movie. Sure the main character questions his Jewish identity. But the film's also got slurs for everyone: ethnic, racial, religious.
6. "THE EDGE" After a plane goes down in this 1997 movie, the Mamet-ian mind games begin. There's the rich, older man whose now-dead model wife brought him along on the fateful photo shoot. There's the handsome, younger photographer who might or might not have been having an affair with her. In order to survive, they've not only got to outwit man-killing bears but each other.
