David Mamet has been a celebrated playwright for half a century, and there are so many themes and obsessions and modes and rhythms and tics running through his work that it’s easy to survey it all and simply categorize it as “Mametesque.” The continuity is there.
Yet when I look at the chronology of Mamet’s career, I’m struck by a huge and overwhelming schism — one that’s tonal, philosophical, stylistic and defining of his identity. In the plays that put him on the map, like “American Buffalo” and “Sexual Perversity in Chicago,” he was trying to approximate the ways ordinary people talk, which is why the words came out in a jagged profane half-articulate sputter, the characters stepping on each other’s percussive thoughts. It all culminated in Mamet’s 1983 masterpiece, “Glengarry Glen Ross,” a timeless celebration/indictment of small-time con-artist salesmen that turned the deceptive language of hustlers into crookback poetry. He continued in that vein with “Speed-the-Plow” (1988), his trenchant satire of Hollywood.
The schism arrived in 1992, when Mamet wrote “Oleanna,” his two-hander about sexual harassment in an academic setting. In hindsight, the play’s fixation on a he said/she said battle of wills was way ahead of its time. Yet “Oleanna” sounded like it had been written by Chatbot Mamet, as the characters revealed themselves — or, just as often, didn’t — in a fusillade of herky-jerky sentence fragments.
Mamet was no longer mirroring the sound of speech; he was doing an overdeliberate deconstruction of it. The critics had often compared him to Harold Pinter, and just as Pinter became famous for the “pause,” Mamet, maybe believing his own reviews a bit too much, now seemed to fetishize the Mamet anti-pause — the words that came shooting out like minimalist shrapnel, without necessarily adding up. The spectacular sleazy realism of “Glengarry” was its glory. (That’s why the 1992 movie version is the greatest Martin Scorsese movie that Scorsese never made.) But Mamet now seemed to be trying to take the leap into some stylized wordplay version of Cubism. Going forward, his plays became increasingly airless and cryptic and dogmatic. He was no longer capturing human nature. He was pinning it down like a butterfly and diagramming it.
“Henry Johnson” is the film version of a Mamet play that premiered in Los Angeles in 2023 (it’s the first movie he has directed in 17 years), and for its first third, at least, it returns you to that space where there’s nothing more riveting — on stage or in a movie — than the sound of two people going at each other, using words as shields and weapons. In this case, the people are Henry (Evan Jonigkeit), the film’s title character, a junior executive with an owlish manner and Paul Thomas Anderson’s haircut, and his boss, Mr. Barnes, played by Mamet regular Chris Bauer, who reminds me a lot of the late ’70s and ’80s character actor Tim McIntire (who has long been rumored to be the illegitimate son of Orson Welles). Bauer, with his jowly baby face, tears into the role of a disputatious senior company officer who talks to his underling so aggressively that we realize, before long, that he’s interrogating him.
As they stand in an office with traditional trappings (hooded lamps, whiskey cabinet), Barnes wants to know about Henry’s relationship with a scandalous friend who was convicted of manslaughter. And when we hear about the crime, it’s dark and disturbing. The friend got someone pregnant and wanted her to terminate the pregnancy; when she refused, he induced a miscarriage through violence. Early on, you get a bitter taste of Mamet the neoconservative, as this crime seems designed to be the playwright’s subtextual provocation on the issue of abortion. But the real subject of the dialogue is what a psychopath Henry’s friend is, going back to when he was a college womanizer who saw, even then, that Henry was the kind of squishy trusting soul who could be his mark.
“Henry Johnson” consists of three acts, each in a different setting, with each built around a monologue posing as a conversation. Henry is the one character who appears in every scene. That first act, which is a rumination on the ways of human manipulation, ends with a twist: the accusation of a crime, and the revelation that Henry was closer to his friend than we thought. In the next scene, Henry is in prison, wearing yellow prison duds, and our first thought is: How is this dweeb going to survive there for five minutes?
His cellmate, Gene (LaBeouf), raises that question. Henry seems like he has no street smarts, let alone prison smarts. Whereas Gene seems like the street-smartest criminal you’ve ever seen. He’s one of those brilliant, skeevy, cunning sociopath-philosophers of violence, like Jack Henry Abbott, and LaBeouf inhabits him with awesome conviction. Gene’s eyes are always studying you (they’re like radar), and he’s got a sense of everything from the meaning of princess fairy tales (the villain and the prince, he says, are the same person) to how to avoid being killed in the prison yard.
Yet as good as LaBeouf is, Gene’s tangled rant of aggression and advice starts to be a bit much. He is clearly Mamet’s mouthpiece, but the movie begins to lose the thread of what it’s about. Evan Jonigkeit (who is Mamet’s son-in-law) makes Henry such a passive, petulant naïf that we never develop much of a rooting interest in him. He’s a dupe in two ways: Everyone around him keeps manipulating him, and Mamet doesn’t seem too interested in what happens to him. “Henry Johnson” is a parade of showy conceits that never entirely becomes, you know…a play. The film starts to go off the rails when we learn that Henry has been carrying on a flirtation with his prison counselor. Everything about this — and the fact that Gene wants Henry to use the relationship to get himself a gun — feels fatally contrived, to the point that Mamet couldn’t even be bothered to fill it in.
And then, in the last act, Henry has got his gun. He has taken the prison librarian (Dominic Hoffman) hostage, and everything that happens seems totally unreal, but Mamet doesn’t care, because he’s got another monologue for you to listen to. This one is from the librarian, and it doesn’t work…at all. The film deflates in front of your eyes.
But really, as you think back on it, you realize it’s been deflating for a while, even during LaBeouf’s forceful performance, because David Mamet is no longer writing plays that pass the smell test of reality. He has, in his own mind, transcended that. He’s writing plays that are delivery systems for his virtuoso word salad of “ideas.” “Henry Johnson” should have a poster with the following tagline: “Three monologues. One dupe. One goddamn verbose playwright.” Watching it, you feel the depth of Mamet’s talent. It’s never left him. But you also feel the contempt he now has for the verities of entertainment. He wants to take us out of our comfort zone. The trouble is that he’s created his own rarefied discomfort zone of self-indulgence posing as importance.
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