USA,
1999, 110 min
Shown in 1999
CREDITS
- dir
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David Mamet
- prod
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Sarah Green
- scr
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David Mamet
- cam
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Benoît Delhomme
- editor
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Barbara Tulliver
- cast
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Nigel Hawthorne, Jeremy Northam, Rebecca Pidgeon, Gemma Jones, Guy Edwards, Matthew Pidgeon
- source
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Sony Pictures Classics, 550 Madison Ave., 8th fl, New York, NY 10022. FAX: 212-833-8844
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COMMENTS
Shown as the Opening Night feature. David Mamet, Sarah Green, Jeremy Northam, Rebecca Pidgeon, Gemma Jones in person.
OTHER
In his latest film, writer/director David Mamet shifts from the American arena of streetwise connivers and deceivers to the realm of English justice, circa 1912. A chilly patriarch, Arthur Winslow, impeccably embodied by Nigel Hawthorne, crusades to exonerate his son, a young naval cadet who is accused of stealing and dismissed from school. Mamet, a spirited iconoclast, uses the period setting and the formal British vernacular to covertly comment on the press as well as on the legal profession and its self-important, often brilliant practitioners who excel at casual brutality. “Emotions cloud the issue. Cold clear logic wins the day,” observes Sir Robert Morton (a perfect Jeremy Northam), the steely barrister who takes the case. Here, as in much of Mamet’s work, language obscures meaning, human relations are clinical and agendas are hidden. The English propensity for understatement has seldom been exercised to more devastating effect. And when there is more than one person in play, there’s sure to be a game on. Mamet, the author of 22 plays and a dozen screenplays, has softened the stylized, rapid-fire dialogue that has become his signature without taking the edge off his acerbic, tough-minded insights.
—Sura Wood
FACTOID #4
2006 New Italian Cinema tributee Marco Belocchio’s debut film Fists in the Pocket screened at the Tenth San Francisco International Film Festival in 1966.
