Smooth Criminals

avid Mamet is a great playwright, a very good screenwriter and a pretty good director. Up until Heist, every film he has helmed has been, at best, a beautiful mess. Actors often have trouble dealing with Mamet's frenetic dialogue--it's reflected in performances that often look like the verbal equivalent of a seizure. Basically, making Mamet come to life is as much as an art form as Mamet's writing. Al Pacino and Jack Lemmon accomplished it in Glengarry Glen Ross--these two highly talented actors, with their own tics, were able to assimilate the dialogue into their performances, creating masterful work. They were the exception to the Mamet-rule.

Until now. In Heist, Gene Hackman and Delroy Lindo steal the film with their nuanced performances that are more edgy and neurotic than Mamet's words. Hackman plays Joe, a master thief. Lindo is his best friend and partner in crime. Along with veteran character actor Ricky Jay and Mamet's super-sexy wife Rebecca Pidgeon, this team of thieves is the best around. The film opens with a highly clever jewel theft where Hackman gets "burnt" by a security camera (burnt is either Mametspeak or actual thief-speak for "caught" or "f---ed"--the term is used so much, it's tough to tell). Joe and his wife (Pidegon) decide to retire, but their fencer, an even scummier Danny DeVito, plays a double cross and lures Hackman into one last grab. It's a tried, tired formula that was poorly executed in this summer's The Score. With Mamet and Hackman, the concept works like a charm.

There is not a boring moment in Heist. With all of the double, triple and quadruple crossing going on, you don't have time to check your watch and make a popcorn run--if you miss a beat, then you will be out of sync for a few minutes. Also, a very stylish, intense score from Theodore Shapiro will keep you fully focused. At some points the banter moves so fast, there's hardly a chance to laugh at some of Mamet's wittiest and oddest one-liners since Glengarry.

I'd reprint the one-liners, but they make no sense out of context and come across as nothing more than tough-guy speak. But they are, in a nutshell, everything that Mamet is and everything that a dialogue hack like Quentin Tarantino is not. Mamet's lines are just sane enough (spare the Chinese baby line toward the end) to be taken as plausible thief speak; Tarantino writes the way he thinks tough guys should talk, not the way they would.

Hackman delivers the lines with wry skill that both shows his experience as an actor and also betrays his age (71). It's his best work since 1992's Unforgiven. He won the Oscar then, and at least deserves some attention for his work here. Also, any film buff who has seen the 1992 western, where Hackman plays bitter, tyrannical Sheriff Little Bill, will appreciate one of the closing scenes of the film. Mamet has given Little Bill a chance to avenge his death in a big way.

The film eventually gets a little too wound up in its double crosses and ends on an off-key note. Still, this is Mamet's best work--by far. Surrounding himself with actors that fit his writing style, Mamet creates a film in this stolen genre, that itself is worth stealing.