This movie has undeniable qualities: some of the best dialogue since the glory days of Billy Wilder, and a talent-packed dream-team cast (though the latter is never a guarantee; if it was, "Yellowbeard" would have been the greatest comedy of its era).
But ultimately it's a filmed play, and director Foley's failure to find anything visually interesting to do with it makes the movie feel more like a television program than anything else, albeit an unusually fine one. While this isn't necessarily a killing drawback, it doesn't provide a reason to see the film rather than a good stage production.
The compensation lies in the performances. For Alec Baldwin to steal the show from the line-up around him is a work of unparalleled larceny, and yet he does, with the help of a painfully funny new monologue provided by Mamet. The ghost of amusement in his voice as he asks, "Oh, have I got your attention now?" is something terrible to hear. He is Contempt Incarnate, and the outrageousness of the scene borders on the surreal.
The rest of the cast is predictably good, with Harris and Arkin particularly adept at Mamet's cross-talk rhythm, Pacino masterfully arrogant, and Spacey, before he had hit stardom, icily memorable. Lemmon goes further; his work here has some of the iconic quality of his performances of the 1960s. (The "Simpsons" character modeled on Lemmon's Shelley isn't a bad bell-weather for enduring pop resonance.) The crawling sense of need he projects becomes something genuinely uncomfortable to watch. Arriving at a young couple's house drenched in rain, his gray-white hair plastered flat, and his mouth pulled back in its ghastly salesman's smile, he captures something alarmingly real about the price of failure in America. As his sales pitch evaporates he is at last left only with an increasingly forced chuckle. In a life that consists only of patter, tragedy is having nothing left to say.
But ultimately it's a filmed play, and director Foley's failure to find anything visually interesting to do with it makes the movie feel more like a television program than anything else, albeit an unusually fine one. While this isn't necessarily a killing drawback, it doesn't provide a reason to see the film rather than a good stage production.
The compensation lies in the performances. For Alec Baldwin to steal the show from the line-up around him is a work of unparalleled larceny, and yet he does, with the help of a painfully funny new monologue provided by Mamet. The ghost of amusement in his voice as he asks, "Oh, have I got your attention now?" is something terrible to hear. He is Contempt Incarnate, and the outrageousness of the scene borders on the surreal.
The rest of the cast is predictably good, with Harris and Arkin particularly adept at Mamet's cross-talk rhythm, Pacino masterfully arrogant, and Spacey, before he had hit stardom, icily memorable. Lemmon goes further; his work here has some of the iconic quality of his performances of the 1960s. (The "Simpsons" character modeled on Lemmon's Shelley isn't a bad bell-weather for enduring pop resonance.) The crawling sense of need he projects becomes something genuinely uncomfortable to watch. Arriving at a young couple's house drenched in rain, his gray-white hair plastered flat, and his mouth pulled back in its ghastly salesman's smile, he captures something alarmingly real about the price of failure in America. As his sales pitch evaporates he is at last left only with an increasingly forced chuckle. In a life that consists only of patter, tragedy is having nothing left to say.