Rassegna stampa di David Mamet

Nato da genitori ebrei russi, farà del tema dell'ebraismo un elemento costante della sua attività di soggetista e di regista. Debutta in teatro e poi si fa notare come sceneggiatore con A proposito della notte scorsa (1986) e American buffalo (1996). Nel 1984 vince il prestigioso premio Pulitzer con Glengarry Glen Ross che sarò portato sullo schermo nel 1992 con il titolo Americani (1992) con un cast d'eccezione comprendente Jack Lemmon, Kevin Spacey, Al Pacino ed Ed Harris. Il film racconta, attraverso le disavventure di un gruppo di agenti immobiliari, il fallimento del sogno americano tanto da risultare epifanico per chiunque voglia intraprendere la carriera di venditore. Nel 1987 esordisce alla regia con La casa dei giochi (1987), discreto giallo interpretato da Joe Mantegna che spesso apparirà nei suoi film. Negli anni successivi alterna l'attività di sceneggiatore con soggetti come Il verdetto (1988) e Gli intoccabili(1992), capolavoro di Brian De Palma, a quella di regista (a dire il vero meno brillante). Dietro la macchina da presa realizza Le cose cambiano (1988) in cui appare il nostro Luca Barbareschi (ahimè! unico attore italiano a portare sulle scene le opere drammaturgiche di Mamet), Homicide (1991) cupo e violento poliziesco, Oleanna (1994) e il bellissimo La formula (1998) noir eccellente con uno strepitoso Steve Martin per una volta in un ruolo non comico. Nel 1999 riscrive e adatta per il grande schermo Il caso Winslow (1999) che si ispira ad una vicenda realmente accaduta già portata sullo schermo negli anni '50. Recentemente ha girato il giallo Il colpo (2001) classico thriller con Gene Hackman che ricalca La formula, almeno per l'assunto di base e cioè l'avidità di denaro e l'inganno di tutti contro tutti, e il corrosivo Hollywood, Vermont (2002) che mette alla berlina vizi e manie del mondo della celluloide.

The apotheosis of David Mamet comes near the start of the movie version of “Glengarry Glen Ross.” Alec Baldwin — hair slicked back, pocket square peaking just so — unleashes a furious, seven-minute tirade against some underperforming real estate salesmen. “First prize is a Cadillac Eldorado,” he says of a sadistic new contest to increase business. “Second prize is a set of steak knives. ... Third prize is you’re fired.” After insulting his listeners’ manhood, competence and just about every other attribute that can be impugned with a well-aimed profanity, Baldwin caps the presentation by extracting from his briefcase and brandishing a pair of huge brass balls.
Terse lyricism, vicious comedy, masculinity that’s at once aggressive and pathetic, lots and lots of swear words: virtually every facet of the Mamet persona gets a note or two in this aria of testosterone. It says a great deal for this speech and others like it in his fierce early works (“American Buffalo,” “Edmond,” “Speed-the-Plow”) that his public profile even now remains that of a swaggering, foul-mouthed Chicagoan, despite a couple of decades’ worth of work that tells a more complicated story.
Although it’s long been the privilege of major American playwrights to wander off the reservation, Mamet has done so more aggressively than most. What was once a side business in Hollywood has become something closer to a full-time occupation. In addition to writing some two dozen screenplays, he has directed 10 films, including “The Winslow Boy,” about the kind of proper English folk that his earlier characters would have mugged, and “Spartan,” a political thriller about agents for a lethal secret government agency that gave him the idea for the television series “The Unit,” which he continues to produce. He has written 11 nonfiction books ventilating on everything from the movie business (“Bambi vs. Godzilla”) to anti-Semitism and Jewish self-hatred (“The Wicked Son”). He’s written three novels and directed commercials for Ford. He also draws cartoons.

Any biographer trying to make sense of such a far-flung body of work faces a difficult task — one made more urgent when the subject happens to be the greatest American playwright of his generation. First to attempt the feat is Ira Nadel, a professor of English at the University of British Columbia, who has also written books on Tom Stoppard, Leonard Cohen and James Joyce. With “David Mamet” clocking in under 280 pages, notes and all, it would have taken a miracle of compression to do justice to every facet of Mamet’s life, especially with Mamet still living it. (“November,” his new presidential comedy starring Nathan Lane, opened just last month on Broadway.) All the same, Nadel aims high, setting out “to align the outer story of Mamet’s life with the inner” — that is, synching up the full range of Mamet’s work with his closely guarded personal affairs.
It helps that the raw material on both counts is memorably vivid. You can’t spend more than a minute or two with “Lakeboat,” his play about men working a Great Lakes freighter, or “The Cabin,” his excellent collection of autobiographical essays, without hearing echoes of Hemingway. In fact, the more you learn of the playwright’s life, the more seriously you have to consider the possibility that Mamet may himself be a Hemingway character. Here is a Nick Adams-ish tough-guy hunter/poet, who was once (and may still be) a member of both the National Rifle Association and the American Civil Liberties Union, with a crew cut and bluejeans that say “man’s man” but accessories that say otherwise. (“To still wear a beret in 2004,” said Val Kilmer, “you have to have guts.”) It’s easy to imagine Mamet sitting down to work in his Vermont cabin, nudging aside his antique Colt revolver paperweight and chanting the Hemingway dictum: “Tell the story, take out the good lines and see if it still works.”
Mamet doesn’t seem to have given Nadel many chances to watch him putting that advice to work, or doing anything else. The book’s only reference to a personal interaction concerns Nadel’s trip to Mamet’s Los Angeles synagogue. Shorn of the biggest advantage of writing about a living subject, Nadel’s book falls back on recapping the events of Mamet’s life while trying to find an artful way of mentioning all the plays and books and other things. The biography works best when there’s least competition for Nadel’s focus, as when he describes Mamet’s parents: the harsh, demanding father who “bluffed” his way into Northwestern Law School using a faked transcript, going on to finish first in his class and to become a successful labor lawyer; the mother and stepfather whose cruelty helped the boy grow up to be the sort of person who writes David Mamet plays. But Nadel runs into trouble once the young acting teacher (and sometime cabdriver/real estate salesman) gets the hang of playwriting. The 1975 junk shop tragedy “American Buffalo” made the 26-year-old Mamet’s reputation, and helped do the same for his city’s theater scene. Before long, Yale invited him to teach, freeing him from his job writing naked-lady captions for Oui magazine. He declined Hollywood advances, then accepted them, if ambivalently at first.
Nadel tries to keep up with these developments in long, unfocused chapters that twirl around the action. He generates little narrative momentum, frequently repeating facts and leaving the occasional strange gap. At one point he offers a golden anecdote in which an uncharacteristically doubt-stricken Mamet sends a new script to Harold Pinter, who assures him that it isn’t so bad after all and sends it along to someone at the National Theater — which is how “Glengarry Glen Ross,” modern masterpiece and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, found its way to the stage. But Nadel never tells us how these giants of postwar drama met in the first place, or anything else about a relationship that must be fascinating (and, in light of their radically different views on Israel, rather vexed). A later unelaborated gem led me to scribble this note: “David Mamet wrote an unfilmed screenplay about the life of Malcolm X?”
For all Nadel’s research, his book captures little of his subject’s unruly brilliance. He offers a useful insight, as when he ties Mamet’s impatience with emotionally manipulative acting to the way he was manipulated at home in his youth, then reverts to clumsy banality. “Mamet’s importance and popularity is unquestioned,” Nadel writes in his conclusion. “The playwright, director, screenwriter stands at the pinnacle of contemporary American drama by his intensity and volume.” The definitive biography will need to cut more finely, separating not just successes from failure but success from success. Mamet has written a scathing play about sexual politics, “Oleanna”; the screenplay for a brilliant and (I’d wager) timeless political satire, “Wag the Dog”; and an uproarious courtroom farce, “Romance.” But these all pale next to “American Buffalo” and “Glengarry Glen Ross.” You could explain the genius of those two plays by saying that Mamet’s approach to drama (making action — what the characters want — the overwhelming focus of the story) gives him a uniquely potent way of criticizing an entire society ruled by what people want, and what they do to get it. You could say, too, that Mamet’s blue-collar adventures helped give the story crucial nuance. “BUFFALOS was really a play about the NEED FOR TENDERNESS,” he wrote astutely to Gregory Mosher, who directed both of his masterpieces. “GGR is a play about VICIOUS AMBITION.”
But the definitive Mamet biography will above all need to give a full accounting of his voice. Mamet, according to Mosher, “worked the iambic pentameter out of the vernacular of the underclass.” For all the comparisons to Pinter, there is nothing like Mamet’s profane poetry in modern drama. No one writing for the stage today has done more to make playgoers listen, to remind them that theater remains, at heart, a verse form fallen on prosy hard times. How did he do it? The answer is a Rosebud that still needs finding.
Jeremy McCarter, the theater critic at New York magazine, is editing a collection of Henry Fairlie’s writing.
A Life in the Theatre.
By Ira Nadel.
278 pp. Palgrave Macmillan. $26.95.
Da The New York Times, 24 Febbraio 2008