REDBELT sss Written and directed by David Mamet With Chiwetel Ejiofor, Alice Braga, Tim Allen, Emily Mortimer, Max Martini, Ricky Jay, Joe Mantegna, and David Paymer
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Redbelt emphatically reverses this decline by combining in near-perfect proportion what Mamet loves and hates about Hollywood. The most interesting aspect of his movie work has always been his ardent embrace of genre, and Redbelt is a classic fight film, with Chiwetel Ejiofor (Dirty Pretty Things) as an honorable martial arts master forced into the ring for a hyped-up TV match. But nesting inside this familiar archetype is a sour little 70s-style David Mamet play about the lies, calculations, and ice-cold politics of the entertainment industry, as the fighter is befriended and then discarded by a callow TV star (Tim Allen). The result is both a solid commercial property (Redbelt opened last weekend on some 1,300 screens) and a legitimate work of art. That sort of duality was common during the golden age of Hollywood, when the insatiable demand for movies gave studio artisans a fair amount of creative leeway, but these days it’s a rarity.
The nice thing about being treasured for your cynicism is that you can take the money without tarnishing your reputation, and Mamet is particularly well positioned in that regard. His fascination with Hollywood operators has been evident since his 1988 play Speed-the-Plow, in which two producers debate whether to green-light a serious film or an action blockbuster, and he poked fun at the industry’s cravenness and duplicity in State and Main and his Oscar-nominated screenplay for Barry Levinson’s Wag the Dog (1997). Bambi vs. Godzilla, Mamet’s 2007 book about the art of filmmaking and the perfidies of the movie business, locates the industry’s original sin inside the heart of the producer. But no producer could’ve made Heist or Spartan without a script in hand, so who’s to blame for them?
