State and Main (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

David Mamet‘s film, State and Main (2000), concerns contretemps and obstacles between a moviemaking team and the citizens of a town called Waterford, Vermont, where the team is fashioning a film.  The characters captivate: William H. Macy‘s agitated director, Alec Baldwin‘s hugely popular actor and nymphet-loving pervert, Rebecca Pidgeon’s bright, affable bookstore owner, Philip Seymour Hoffman’s diffident scenarist, and many others.

Like the witty dialogue, the plot is fun except that a glaring defect springs up when Clark Gregg‘s pushy prosecutor tries to build a statutory-rape case against Baldwin when he certifiably has no case at all.  Gregg—his character—wouldn’t be that stupid.  But something else bothers me more:  Mamet, in truth, has nothing new to tell us about corruption or Hollywood folly, and that is entirely what his film is about.  All State and Main can do is dispense airy cynicism—well, that in addition to showing us that somewhere deep inside Mamet he is a glorifier of the past.  Not merely deep inside, of course, he is a conservative.

Mamet’s 1999 The Winslow Boy worked (as did his Phil Spector).  The present film almost works, but not quite.  Even so, it’s one of the most enjoyable failures I’ve seen, and if you can put up with airy cynicism you might enjoy it too.

1968: a public high school in Philadelphia.

This is what Frederick Wiseman, America’s most famous documentary maker, trained his camera on 56 years ago, in High School.  A dandy film, it reveals perfectly the unkillable regimentation in modern schools, although the classrooms in this particular, predominately white school do not drive us to the kind of despair that dysfunctional schools in 2023 do.  Still, there are problems, regimentation or no.  Bad behavior runs its course, albeit we don’t see any violence or cussing out of teachers.  There is some fluff in the instruction:  one teacher guides her students to appreciate the “poetry” of Paul Simon.  She reads aloud the lyrics to “The Dangling Conversation,” then plays a tape of the song.  And clinical lectures about sex just might have run counter to the moral values of many of the kids’ 1968 parents.

On the other hand, a Spanish-language teacher inculcates what seems to be the Spanish for “existentialist philosopher.”  Nope: this is not a 2023 public school.

Cover of Counsellor-at-Law

I don’t quite understand what the film Counsellor at Law (1933), derived from a play by Elmer Rice, is about, but it certainly holds the viewer.  This is thanks mostly to director William Wyler and his actors.

John Barrymore carries the film beautifully, with force and despair, and the women here are nigh enthralling.  A successful New York lawyer (Barrymore) becomes imperiled in more ways than one as Wyler’s camera captures the unceasing contacts and interaction in this particular law firm.  Regarding his direction, Wyler said, “No critic ever wrote that [the movie] was just a photographed stage play.”  No, indeed.  The play has been thoroughly cinematized.  Indeed, Wyler’s directing is so astute and sensitive we can forgive the film’s irritatingly pat conclusion.