The Gamut Of Mamet

By RICHARD CORLISS

You are a decent sort--ambitious, a bit rigid and guarded, perhaps not the most likable person around, but smart and honest. The stakes are high in your career; pleasures are morphing into pressures. Then you have what seems like an innocuous conversation, and things change. Someone is playing tricks on you, making your life hell. You are the victim of a long con. Hey, it's only business. The American way.

You are the hero of a David Mamet movie, of House of Games, Homicide, Oleanna or his newest, finest shell game, The Spanish Prisoner. In this diamond-hard, ice-cold thriller, young Joe Ross (Campbell Scott) has developed a secret "process" worth billions to his company, whose chief (Ben Gazzara) is slow to give Joe credit and quick to worry about someone stealing the process. In the company Joe has an ally (Ricky Jay) and a No. 1 fan, a perkily sarcastic secretary (Rebecca Pidgeon). But Joe is tempted to confide in Jimmy Dell (Steve Martin), a mysterious fellow with a wise warning: "Always do business as if the person you're doing business with is trying to screw you. Because most likely they are. And if they're not, you can be pleasantly surprised."

Joe will not be pleasantly surprised. To protect himself and the process, he'll be grilled, chased and pretty much treated like another Joseph, in Kafka's The Trial (original German title: Der Prozess). But don't let the pedigree fool you. The Spanish Prisoner is exemplary entertainment. Come expecting a dour jeremiad on man's corruptibility--or even a slice-of-lice drama like Mamet's American Buffalo or Glengarry Glen Ross--and you'll be pleasantly surprised. The villains in The Spanish Prisoner (like the war-games con men in Mamet's Wag the Dog script) dress well, speak softly and carry a silver stiletto. They kill for sport.

With something of the same method and intent, Mamet writes about Hollywood. His plays, films and essays contain many scalding observations on mainstream filmmaking. Yet from 1981's The Postman Always Rings Twice through The Verdict, The Untouchables, Hoffa and The Edge, Mamet has written solid, burly movies for top producers and stars while pursuing a parallel career with the modestly budgeted films he writes and directs himself. "I'm really fortunate," he says. "I have some good friends and supporters in Hollywood." And he knows that part of his job as a filmmaker is "shaking money out of those suits on the other side of the table. It's a natural antipathy between the suits and the talent, for want of a better word. That's just the way the world is."

Mamet's fictive world was distinctive from the get-go. His plays, beginning with the 1974 Sexual Perversity in Chicago, wrapped Pinteresque menace in comically precise diction, like a gamier Damon Runyon. It was Jewish guys talking like Italian guys about life, death and, always, a poignant memory of the perfect woman, long ago or never. ("Bobby," says the dying cop in Homicide, "you remember that girl that time?") But at 50, Mamet has other concerns. The overtly serious work tends to be about Jewishness (in his play The Old Neighborhood and novel The Old Religion); the nastily comic, about man's love of the scam (the card-shark show Ricky Jay & His 52 Assistants, recently off-Broadway, and this spiffy new film).

At 1 hour 50 minutes, The Spanish Prisoner clocks in as one of Mamet's longest works. Yet there are ellipses aplenty, in plot and dialogue, to tantalize and mystify the viewer. "I'm always trying to keep it spare," Mamet says. "Trudy Ship, the editor on my first films, said in editing, 'You start with a scalpel, and you end with a chainsaw.' I think that's true of writing too. For me the real division between a serious writer and an unserious one is whether they're willing to cut."

A Mamet shoot isn't solemn. "There's a great atmosphere on the set," says Martin, whom Mamet wanted to work with ever since seeing him in a 1988 revival of Waiting for Godot, and who seamlessly joins such Mamet familiars as Pidgeon (the author's wife) and Jay. "You can make a great movie having fun as easily as you can make a great movie having angst." Mamet loves devising practical jokes, keeping the actors loose, writing gags just for the joy of it. He's written 20 or so plays, five original screenplays he's directed, seven scripts for hire, two novels, four children's books and a load of collected essays. Whatever the word is for the opposite of a writer's block--writerrhea?--Mamet has it.

Ask him why he works so hard, and he cites Noel Coward: "Work is more fun than fun." Or, as con artiste Joe Mantegna says in House of Games, "What's more fun than human nature?" Like all those purring predators in The Spanish Prisoner, David Mamet devotes much of his working life to nothing more or less complicated than playing artful games. On you.

--With reporting by William Tynan/New York

With reporting by William Tynan/New York