Movies about movie-making are always interesting for the sidelight they throw on the process, though they do run the risk of self-indulgence. Federico Fellini’s classic 8 1/2 is in part about such self-indulgence, showing us a confused filmmaker swamped by fantasy as much as by the travails of getting a movie together, and works flamboyantly well. The recent Entropy, on the other hand, about an equally frustrated young director, is so annoyingly pretentious that one can’t even muster enough goodwill to hope the young director gets a single frame in the can.
David Mamet’s new movie, State and Main, a cuttingly funny view of Hollywood-style filmmaking, is not self-indulgent at all, unless you count the foibles of the characters. Mamet should know: after his initial success as a playwright, he moved successfully into scriptwriting for the cinema, directing his own as well as adding some wit to others’ scripts – in The Untouchables and Hannibal, for example. Not that it helped in the latter instance.
The title of State and Main alludes to the potholed intersection of two roads in a small American town, but it is in fact about another intersection – that of the self-involved, driven Hollywood world and the sleepy life of a rustic hamlet. That peaceful world is rudely interrupted by this caravan of compromised creativity.
The movie-in-progress is called The Old Mill. The filmmakers have had to abandon their previous location for reasons unstated but easy to surmise as the narrative progresses. Now they are settling in to this fresh location in rural Vermont, a village that allegedly has precisely such a mill – the cornerstone, or perhaps the millstone, of the script.
Except that things are not going as planned; in fact, things are perpetually on the verge of disaster. The male lead (Alec Baldwin) has a little ”hobby” which could derail everything; the female lead (Sarah Jessica Parker of TV’s Sex and the City fame) has second thoughts about nudity. The scriptwriter (Philip Seymour Hoffman) has to make sudden changes to the story, while a local
politican (Clark Gregg) is determined to get his pound of flesh from the filmmakers. And so on.
It all dashes along at a hectic pace, as hectic as the continual cellphone gabbing of the director (William H Macy), organising this, ordering that. There seem to be a hundred things going on at once, which must be pretty much how it is when a movie’s being made. State and Main is also as casually vicious as the producer (David Paymer) who has to solve some of the production’s problems in his own piranha-like way.
The ensemble does sterling work throughout. Macy and Hoffman (last seen together in Magnolia) are superb actors, doing what they do so well, and those of limited range – Baldwin and Parker – are cast in a way that plays to their strengths and makes sense of their weaknesses. In this case, that means lustful egotism and inarticulate vapidity respectively, though I suspect Parker could stretch out
some more in deeper roles if she had to. Among the others, Charles Durning brings his usual comic-tinged gravitas to the town’s mayor, and Julia Stiles brings both her feline beauty and a sly intelligence to the role of a young woman with seductive plans of her own.
In the fine old tradition of directors from Fellini to Jean-Luc Godard, Mamet casts his wife, Rebecca Pidgeon, as perhaps the most sympathetic character in the movie – the local community-theatre director who gives the unfortunate scriptwriter some much-needed assistance, in more ways than one. She is quietly attractive as a personality; she is the film’s moral centre.
The movie-about-making-a-movie that State and Main most resembles is François Truffaut’s Day for Night, which had the more resonant title La Nuit Américane in French – that’s what the French call it when you’re shooting in daylight but with filters to make it seem like nighttime. Mamet’s film has its own verve, though; the special Mamet touch, his velvety-black humour, and his delightfully razor-sharp view of human venality and stupidity. And, of course, it has the specificity of the American setting, and the satirical possiblities of the Hollywood manner. State and Main is a great deal of intelligent fun, but if you have cinematic ambitions you may leave it feeling a little frightened.