***1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Val Kilmer, Derek Luke, William H. Macy, Ed O’Neill, Tia Texada, Clark Gregg, Said Taghmaoui, Kick Gurry, and Kristen Bell
Directed & written by David Mamet
2004
106 min R
Dozen-or-So Best Films of 2004
“Spartan” is a spell. In a second I’ll tell you the plot, I promise, but first I have to describe that spell. The movie is the work of Pulitzer-winning playwright-turned-director David Mamet, who has one of the craziest ears for dialogue I have ever heard. In “Glengarry Glen Ross” he turns the streaming profanity of overworked middle-aged men into poetry. In “House of Games” everyone seems to have put down a Raymond Chandler novel seconds prior to opening their mouths. The professional thieves in “Heist” are so worried that they’re being followed that everything they say is completely elliptical. Mamet’s uncredited work for “Ronin” resulted in a spy talk so short-handed and abbreviated that sentences are rarely longer than three syllables.
Mamet carries his spy epic “Spartan” like last year’s “Master & Commander: The Far Side of the World,” in which very, very little, if anything, is explained for the audience’s benefit. The spies talk spy talk, complete with all manner of lingo, abbreviations, and short-hand, and that’s it. If we can’t figure out what’s going on, well, tough. There’s no Dr. McCoy character to ask how everything works.
The common thread here, whether we’re talking con men, spies, real estate agents, or thieves, is that everything spoken is coded, loaded, filled with implications and allusions. People who’ve known each other a long time develop a shorthand, which is certainly true of Mamet’s work. So, on the one hand, Mamet’s people talk realistically because they are unconscious of trying to translate for the benefit of an audience. Yet no one in the real world talks like this. For everything Mamet does there is a rhythm, there is music, there’s even a refrain, and the punchy refrain that comes back again and again in “Spartan” is “where’s the girl?” Every so often, a harried middle-aged man in a good suit storms into a room, looks at a map or something on the wall, and barks out “where’s the girl?” I’ll be damned if I can define the meter, but it’s always the right note at the right time, and it feels so good. Shakespeare has iambic pentameter and Mamet has…whatever the hell he has.
But the craziest is yet to come. In an interview Mamet said that the most important aspect of a film are its images. For all the head-spinning weirdness of his dialogue, the story is ultimately found in the pictures, not in the words. If you turned off the sound on “Spartan,” you might be able to follow it just fine. But if you only read the dialogue, you’d be lost-er than lost.
There are two bits of verbal acrobatics I want to highlight. First is when the spy (Val Kilmer) is disguised as a campus cop and wants some information from a mixed-up college student. He asks the boy what he wants to know, then turns everything on its head by saying “Do you want to tell me about it? I’ll give you one minute.” And that’s the clever bit: “I’ll give you one minute.” A casual enough comment, but it completely reverses the conversation. The spy has just tricked the boy into thinking that the boy wants to tell things to the spy. The other exchange involves a man walking in as Kilmer’s spy sneaks through his house. The way the spy tries to talk his way out of this has to be seen (and heard) to be believed. It’s mind-boggling and, yet, it might actually work. I suppose my point is that everyone talks like they’re watching a different movie than the rest of us.
So on to the plot, which is about halfway between the territory of Tom Clancy and John Le Carre. A nameless agent (Kilmer) is assigned to recover a missing girl (Kristen Bell) from person or persons unknown. She is the President’s daughter, although the movie would never tell you that; phrases such as “President,” “White House,” and “First Lady” never crop up, and there are only one or two mentions of the Secret Service. The girl’s trail leads Kilmer to exotic and mysterious locations, at home and abroad, and several deadly encounters in all the usual places: alleys, airfields, mansions, lakeside cottages. Kilmer has various superiors; good to better to best is embodied by reliable character actor Clark Gregg, then William H. Macy, one of the great saints of supporting players, until we finally confront none other than Al Bundy himself. Yes, when Ed O’Neill stormed on screen to take his turn at shouting “where’s the girl?” a very satisfied cheer came from the audience. Kilmer is joined on his quest by two young army rangers (Derek Luke of “Antoine Fisher” and Tia Texada of “13 Conversations About One Thing”) with chips on their shoulders.
Again, begging comparison to “Master & Commander,” Mamet directs “Spartan” with long takes, tangents, and not much music. When the conspiracy is finally unwound, it is not the most complex we’ve ever seen. It is only the surrounding dialogue and the ensuing subtexts that are almost infinitely labyrinthine. The characters have to figure out the cryptic comments of the other characters, then we have to figure out what they figured out and how. The movie is packed with set-ups that never pay-off. To wit, Kilmer arms himself for a shoot-out that never happens. His men prepare an attack only to have it aborted. Kilmer even makes another plan to storm the same mansion, only to break it off. Players who should be safe to finish their character arcs are shot dead. The feeling is that, not only are the secret agents subject to twists and turns, but even the audience feels like its getting played: we have certain expectations from this genre, but we have to stay on our feet because those expectations are set-up but never fulfilled.
“Spartan” works equally as a character study and a thriller. In this way it is more Le Carre than Clancy. Kilmer’s spy describes himself over and over as a “worker bee.” He does what he is told to the best of his abilities, without conscience or reservation, no matter how ruthless or inexplicable, no more and no less. He has the same moral cruise control as the samurai: he has chosen to serve his master and he considers himself absolved from any sins he is ordered to do. Whether or not he tampers or adjusts this worldview—whether his character is indeed dynamic—is up for debate.
So the big question is “why?” Why oh why has Mamet chosen to make “Spartan” so oblique? Is it simply a matter of making us work hard so that we feel for the hard work of the characters? “Spartan’s” stated theme is about the shifting of truth, about how the same facts can be seen in different ways to mean different things. Certainly dialogue this amorphous can mean anything. We may think of events and experiences as concrete, but lo and behold they can mean anything. I mean, I guess. I don’t know. I’m gonna lay down before my head pops.
Finished March 21st, 2004
Copyright © 2004 Friday & Saturday Night
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