Essential Movies About Movies: Brian Gallagher on STATE AND MAIN
While David Mamet is perhaps best known as one of America’s finest playwrights, he is also an accomplished filmmaker. One of his best films is a searing satire that takes aim at the Hollywood institution itself, 2000’s STATE AND MAIN. I discovered this film on a whim, during a bygone era where a glorious edifice known as the “video store” was prevalent. Eighteen years later, it’s still one of a handful of movies I make sure to watch every year, like THE REF and THE SOCIAL NETWORK and THE SEARCHERS, if, for no other reason than it’s just that damn good.
Mamet never has been (nor likely never will be) a “populist” writer-director, even though many of the films that he did write and did not direct (THE UNTOUCHABLES, GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS, WAG THE DOG, HANNIBAL) were in fact quite popular. As a writer-director, though, he often veered towards satire, and STATE AND MAIN represents the zenith of his satirical brilliance. It also doesn’t hurt that he also put together perhaps one of the best casts he has ever assembled.
It is perhaps that Mamet has had experience both in and out of the Hollywood studio system that makes him the perfect candidate to skewer it so splendidly in STATE AND MAIN, which follows a big-budget movie production called THE OLD MILL that is forced to move their film to the sleepy town of Waterford, Vermont, after they were banished from the previous sleepy New England town they tried to film in. As one would come to expect from a Mamet production, the cast of characters are remarkably colorful, and the actors who play them are at the top of their game.
While STATE AND MAIN is an ensemble in the truest sense of the word, if there were any “lead” it would be William H. Macy’s Walt Price, the director of THE OLD MILL who spends much of the film putting out various fires, so to speak, while delivering biting lines of dialogue (“Did you show Claire these sketches? Did she throw up?”) Alec Baldwin delivers one of his best performances as iconic movie star Bob Barrenger, who has a knack for ending up with underaged girls, (which is rather eerie now, looking back through the filter of the #MeToo movement), while the late great Philip Seymour Hoffman shines as naive writer Joseph Turner White.
For anyone that has spent any sort of time in the movie business, STATE AND MAIN is among the guiltiest of pleasures you can imagine, skewering everything from actors’ ridiculous demands, how poorly below-the-line crew members are treated and the myriad of problems that surface every day on a movie set. No matter how much the movie industry may in fact change, STATE AND MAIN is still just as timely now, eighteen years after its release, and I’m not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing…
