Death Of A Fucking Salesman

Have you ever felt the need to watch Mamet’s Glengary Glen Ross, but only had three minutes?

Ever wonder what it would look like if you boiled it down to just the profanity? The amazing thing is, it works, in an elliptical-poetic sort of way.

Mamet’s dialogue has a distinctive rhythm, and I respect it even more now after having examined the film line-by-line. Some of his repetitions (“Will you go to lunch? Will YOU go to LUNCH? WILL YOU goto LUNCH?”) can be overdone, but as a whole, the dialogue marches to a very specific cadence. And the closer you watch these performances, the better they get — all of them. It’s hypnotic to watch these ego-driven monsters roar and cower, and the perfectly measured pace of how victory ebbs into desperation is fantastic.

It’s like watching a master class in playwriting, as Mamet’s script chips away at the salesmen’s machismo, line by inexorable line. The directing never elevates the script above its stage roots, but that isn’t a flaw here. the script is so towering, that just staying out of the way serves the material best. Interestingly, too, director James Foley hasn’t come near equalling this work, or this cast. There’s got to be one hell of a story about how a relative unknown gets a cast full of A+ actors for a definitive Mamet adaptation.

Mamet himself would have been an off-choice to direct. His dialogue is beautiful and distinctive, but in his directorial hands, it just becomes alienating. His Spanish Prisoner, State And Main, and Spartan are fantastic scripts, but the finished versions fall apart. They keep their eyes fixated on Mamet’s aesthetic agenda, and wind up tripping over their own feet. It’s a shame, because it would be fascinating to see what a softer, more comically tuned director like Richard Linklater or Juno‘s Jason Reitman could do with the State And Main screenplay. Or what Spike Lee could do with Spartan after his tremendous Inside Man.