Between 2009 and the beginning of last week, dramatist and author David Mamet released 16 new plays and books, some of them exceptional. During the same span, filmmaker David Mamet directed either one or zero feature-length pictures, depending on whether one counts the 2013 made-for-TV movie Phil Spector. To say merely that this imbalance saddened fans of the unofficial laureate of American hustlers is very nearly to engage in Mametian deception, so drastically does it undersell the point. Instead, we were miserable. Yes, the Pulitzer winner delivered Race (2009), one of the best new plays in decades, but where was his much-whispered-about John F. Kennedy assassination film? If the absurdist novel The Diary of a Porn Star by Priscilla Wriston-Ranger (2019) could exist, why couldn’t our man’s long-rumored Will Ferrell collaboration, Joan of Bark: The Dog That Saved France?
Needless to say, politics played more than a small role in director Mamet’s long silence. One doesn’t publish Why I Am No Longer a Brain-Dead Liberal (2008) and other conservative cris de coeur if one hopes to maintain one’s relationships in the industry. Yet it is also the case that many of Mamet’s longtime associates are no longer available to be cast, Ricky Jay, Joe Mantegna, and William H. Macy having either died or aged out of their primes. If the filmmaker’s now-streaming 11th feature, Henry Johnson, represents a modest disappointment, the absence of those familiar talents is at least part of the explanation. Mamet hasn’t made his new movie badly by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s at least arguable that he’s made it 30 years too late.
Like the 1994 film Oleanna, Henry Johnson adapts one of Mamet’s own plays, in this case a three-act prison drama of the same name. The title character, played here by the director’s son-in-law, Evan Jonigkeit, is a classic mark of the kind one might expect to find buying swampland in Glengarry Glen Ross. Henry’s fate, however, is far grimmer than the loss of a few hundred grand. In four increasingly desperate scenes, our protagonist is deceived, imprisoned, manipulated, and cruelly punished. When Henry’s cellmate, Gene (Shia LaBeouf), remarks that “life everywhere is a jungle,” we recognize Henry as one of those fools who are “too ignorant to know it.”
The movie begins in a well-appointed law office, where senior attorney Mr. Barnes (The Wire’s Chris Bauer) is engaged in conversation — or is it an interrogation? — with the film’s lead. Why, Barnes wants to know, has Henry been advocating the hiring of an ex-convict college pal with obvious sociopathic tendencies? And where, in any case, did our hero get the money to pay for his friend’s expensive legal counsel?
In its cadences and complexities, the verbal tug of war thus produced is vintage Mamet. For 20 minutes, Barnes and Henry spar so compellingly that one doesn’t want the jousting to end, revealing slowly but relentlessly the extent to which Henry has been compromised. In standard Mamet fashion, the men’s speech is both pedantic — “You must allow that the phenomenon is fascinating” — and colloquial — “They did that to hold the big stick over him.” The result is stylized, of course, but that is exactly the point. Mamet’s aim is not to replicate but to evoke the tenor of a certain kind of half-articulate gab.
Had Henry Johnson stayed in the law office, it might have gone down as the finest mano-a-mano since Louis Malle’s My Dinner with Andre (1981). Lamentably, the film has little choice but to follow its source material to jail, where Henry converses twice with Gene and once with a gruff corrections officer played by Dominic Hoffman. All three of these exchanges are thrillingly written and acted, at least by Jonigkeit’s stellar scene-mates. The problem is that Mamet has conceived them mostly as monologues, not dialogues. As Henry’s two acquaintances labor pitilessly to warp him to their will, the man himself recedes. We know that our protagonist is amoral, foolish, and as suggestible as a child, but it is less and less clear why that is so.
This void at the heart of the movie might have been filled by a stronger performer. Indeed, the Bill Macy of 1995 would have absolutely crushed the part. Jonigkeit, by contrast, is simply too blank a canvas to imply machinations beneath the surface. Famously a promoter of “just say the line” acting, Mamet is ill-served by his son-in-law’s commitment to doing just that. Has a film named for a character ever had less to say about that figure’s motives, beliefs, values, and designs?
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Some critics will inevitably blame nepotism for the movie’s casting error. I disagree and present as my argument the lovely work done by Mrs. Mamet (the actress Rebecca Pidgeon) in The Spanish Prisoner (1997), The Winslow Boy (1999), and State and Main (2000). Being related to someone doesn’t always make them wrong for the job. Nor is it necessarily true that the film’s leading role required more glamour than the co-star of X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) could muster. What was needed was someone who could play the silences. Jonigkeit is fine when the script gives him an equal share of the action. As a passive listener, however, he is milquetoast, inscrutable, and dull.
Does Henry Johnson survive Henry Johnson? Opinions will vary, as they will on the more delicate question of whether a story this cynical has any takeaways beyond man’s inhumanity to man. My own opinion is that the picture is well worth seeing, especially for fans of the most important American playwright since Arthur Miller. Interesting writing will always merit a trip to the cinema, or, in this case, to a proprietary video-on-demand website. More to the point, second-rate Mamet is better than no Mamet at all.
Graham Hillard is editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal and a Washington Examiner magazine contributing writer.