Mamet slightly off

David Mamet is close to another great film but there are problems, particularly with the ending

by Roger Ebert

David Mamet’s Redbelt assembles all the elements for a great Mamet film, but they’re still spread out on the shop floor.  It never really pulls itself together into the convincing, focused drama it promises, yet it kept me involved right up until the final scenes, which piled on developments almost recklessly.  So gifted is Mamet as a writer and director that he can fascinate us even when he’s pulling rabbits out of an empty hat. 



The movie takes place in that pungent Mamet world of seamy streets on the wrong side of town, and is peopled by rogues and con men, trick artists and thieves, those who believe and those who prey on them.  The cast is assembled from his stock company of actors whose very presence helps embody the atmosphere of a Mamet story, and who are almost always not what they seem, and then not even what they seem after that.  He is fascinated by the deceptions of one confidence game assembled inside another. 



At the center of a story, in a performance evoking intense idealism, is Mike Terry (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a martial arts instructor who runs a storefront studio on a barren city street.  His is not one of those glass and steel fitness emporiums, but a throwback to an earlier time; the sign on his window promises jiu-jitsu, and he apparently studied this art from those little pamphlets with crude illustrations that used to be advertised in the back pages of comic books.  I studied booklets like this as a boy; apparently one embodies the philosophy of The Professor, a Brazilian martial arts master who is like a god to Mike. 



Mike has few customers, is kept afloat by the small garment business of his wife, Sondra (Alice Braga), is seen instructing a Los Angeles cop named Joe Collins (Max Martini).  When you seem to be your studio’s only instructor, the impression is fly-by-night, but there’s a purist quality to Mike’s dedication that has Joe completely convinced, and they both seriously believe in the “honor” of the academy. 



Now commences a series of events it would be useless to describe, and which are eventually almost impossible to understand, involving a troubled lawyer (Emily Mortimer), a movie star (Tim Allen), the star’s shifty manager (Joe Mantegna), and the world of a pay-for-TV fight promoter (Ricky Jay).  All of these characters seem like marked-down versions of the stereotypes they’re based on, and the pay-for-view operation feels more like local access cable than a big bucks franchise. 



In a bewildering series of deceptions, these people entrap the idealistic Mike into debt, betrayal, grief, guilt and cynical disappointments, all leading up to a big televised fight sequence at the end that makes no attempt to be plausible and is interesting (if you are a student of such things) for its visual fakery.  We’ve seen a lot of crowd scenes in which camera angles attempt to create the illusion of thousands of people who aren’t really there, but “Redbelt” seems to be offering a crowd of hundreds (or dozens) who aren’t really there.  At a key point, in a wildly impossible development, the action shifts out of the ring, and the lights and cameras are focused on a man-to-man showdown in a gangway.  The conclusion plays like a low-rent parody of a Rocky victory.  The last shot left me underwhelmed. 



So now you’re wondering why you might want to see this movie at all.  It might be because of the sheer art and craft of Mamet himself.  For his dialogue, terse and enigmatic, as if in a secret code.  For his series of “reveals” in which nothing is as it seems.  For his lost world of fly-by-night operators.  For his actors like Ricky Jay, who would be familiar with the term “suede shoe artist.”  For his bit parts for unexplained magicians.  Especially for a sequence when Mike Terry, as baffled as we are, essentially asks for someone to explain the plot to him. 



If you savor that sort of stuff, and I do, you may like Redbelt on its own dubious but seductive terms.  It seems about to become one kind of movie, a conventional combination of con games and action, and then shadow-boxes its way into a different kind of fight, which is about values, not strength.  It’s this kind of film: Some of the characters at the end, hauled in to provide a moral payoff, seem to have been airlifted from Brazil — which, in fact, they were.

Redbelt

Three stars



Stars: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Alice Braga, and Emily Mortimer

Director: David Mamet

Rated: R for strong language

Too many hats for Hunt

Some nice moments but too many subtle inconsistencies plague directorial debut for Helen Hunt

By Theresa Budasi



Oscar-winning actress Helen Hunt makes her directorial debut with Then She Found Me, in which she also stars and receives a writing credit.  It’s no wonder she looks so haggard throughout the film. 



That said, there are some nice moments in Then She Found Me, such as the scene where April (Hunt) and her brother, Freddy (Ben Shenkman), are sharing a meal, and Freddy says, “You don’t know what it’s like to NOT be adopted.” 



As much as it pained Freddy to say it — he’s embarrassingly teary-eyed as he does — it needed to be said. 



April was adopted, and though she had a good relationship with her recently deceased mother and is close to Freddy, her adoptedness has consumed her.  And now that she’s an orphan again — their father died years earlier — the self-absorbed April is on a mission to have a child of her own before it’s too late.  She’s 39, and her mission is thwarted when her boy-man husband, Ben (a smarmy Matthew Broderick), leaves her after less than a year of marriage, complaining, “I don’t want this life.” 



April’s life snowballs from there into a complicated and emotional mess.  Right after Ben leaves, she begins a flirtation with the divorced father of one of her kindergarten students, and then April’s birth mother contacts her.  And — oops/yea! — it turns out April IS pregnant, the result of breakup sex with Ben. 



Colin Firth and Bette Midler play the love interest and birth mother, respectively, and they are fun to watch.  Both, in their scenes with Hunt, provide some of the other enjoyable moments in the film.  Trouble is, they can’t prop the story up well enough to hold it together. 



Firth’s Frank is a damaged man, still reeling from his wife leaving him with two young children to raise.  He’s dead tired all the time and works out of his car in the school parking lot.  He’s outwardly sensitive and sweet, but inside he’s given to fits of frustration that erupt when he’s had all he can take. 



Midler plays Bernice Graves, a talk-show host April has never heard of, which seems odd.  Bernice is pushy and larger than life — someone who would make sure that her publicity people made her a household name.  This is one in a handful of subtle inconsistencies that keep the worthwhile moments from connecting to anything.  Others are: Bernice’s inability to tell April the truth; April’s “sleepover” with Frank; a spontaneously senseless act in the backseat of April’s car. 



What Hunt handles well is April’s pregnancy.  She doesn’t let everyone’s baggage create extraneous drama.  That April is pregnant by one man and in love with another while trying to come to terms with her own parentage does not keep her from experiencing pure joy over her condition. 



April may be selfish, but she’s also focused and self-aware.  She gives a poignant speech to Frank about hurting those you love, and truer words are rarely spoken in films.  It’s another satisfying moment. 



Hunt has what it takes to direct; you can see it here in small doses.  In an arena filled largely with men, it will be interesting to see what she does next. 

Then She Found Me

Two 1/2 stars



Stars: Helen Hunt, Colin Firth and Bette Midler

Director: Helen Hunt

Rated: R for language and some sexual content