*** (out of ****)
Starring Gene Hackman, Delroy Lindo, Danny DeVito, Sam Rockwell, Rebecca Pidgen, and Ricky Jay.
Directed & written by David Mamet
2001 R
While the title obviously implies a movie about thieves and thievery, “Heist” is at it’s a core a deadpan comedy, possibly the deadest of all pans. It’s also the work of David Mamet, the playwright and director whose “Glengarry Glen Ross,” “Homicide,” and “State and Main” have lovingly explored strung-out middle-aged men smoking cigarettes and swearing at each other. In “Heist” the middle-aged men are a gang of professional thieves and the mob boss who supplies them with jobs, information, and money for equipment. Early on, the mobster (Danny DeVito) doesn’t give the thieves their promised cut after a daring jewelry store robbery. An altercation follows but, eventually, after much soul-searching and name-calling, the thieves agree to do one last robbery on behalf of the mob, and we the audience watch with giddy anxiety to see who will double-cross whom first.
The thieves are portrayed as grizzled veterans by Gene Hackman, Delroy Lindo, and Ricky Jay. The hero of a heist movie is always about to do one last job before riding off into the sunset. For Hackman, the jewelry store was supposed to be the end before taking his boat and his young wife to someplace where the sun always shines, but DeVito’s initial double-cross put a stop to that. Now DeVito’s insisting that the thieves take along his nephew (Sam Rockwell, who with his mustache looks like Jon Cazale with higher self-esteem) to gain experience and to keep an eye on things. Hackman and Lindo think he’s a hothead, too eager to draw a pistol and trying too hard to keep his cool. Together they plot to swipe millions of dollars in freshly-delivered gold from an airport, from the runway itself where the gold has just landed.
Clouding matters is Rebecca Pidgen as Hackman’s wife. Hackman sends her into Rockwell’s arms, at first under the pretense of being a traitor, but even after the movie ends we aren’t sure where her true loyalties lie. Pidgen, who played one of the small-town cards in Mamet’s “State and Main,” is not a traditional Hollywood beauty, and projects a kind of impenetrable intelligence, mostly in her eyes. DeVito takes an enormous delight in his dialogue, taking with deadpan gravity such absurd lines as “everybody needs money, that’s why they call it money” and standing in the middle of a gunfight to yell “we aren’t shooting, we’re supposed to be talking!”
As for Hackman and Lindo, they’re cast-iron professionals, absolutely loyal to each other and the rest of their crew. Their loyalty is probably the only admirable personal trait, besides intelligence, to pop up in the course of the film. But they’re also men running at the ends of their ropes, with veins popping up in their foreheads. Plump character actor Ricky Jay, who looks and acts so often like a once-cool liberal arts professor, is the unassertive but invaluable beta male in their group, and he’s given more than a few well-written scenes. Those familiar with “Mametspeak” will notice that “Heist” uses a variation on that theme: there’s still lots of swearing, but mixed in is a weird criminal lingo, spoken by characters so accustomed to being surveilled or having their phones tapped that everything to them is “the thing” or “the other thing.”
On the spectrum between “The Score” and “Ocean’s Eleven,” “Heist” is somewhere in the middle. It’s more detailed and plausible than the latter but, being more interested in characters and motivation, not as specific about the step-by-step of the robbery as “The Score.” The robbery at the airport is pretty clever, but things get downright ingenious in how the thieves plot to steal from each other. “Heist” is not an action movie, although there are a few brief spurts of violence, notably an outburst on behalf of Lindo when he discovers he’s been double-crossed. Then there’s the riverside shoot-out, which is both intense and comic, in which we realize these so-called tough guys have probably never before fired a weapon in a life-or-death situation.
“Heist’s” biggest success is probably its tone, which is not light-hearted but certainly not weighty. The film’s score is even reminiscent of the crime dramas of the 1970s. How cool is this movie? As Ricky Jay says in description of Gene Hackman, “he’s so cool, when he sleeps sheep count him.”
Finished September 29th, 2002
Copyright © 2002 Friday & Saturday Night