Homicide (1991) - Imprint

[AlanClarke]

I'm super excited about Homicide finally getting a BluRay release. It's one of Mamet's most interesting and seemingly most personal films. The only shame is that the Imprint can't port over the old Criterion DVD extras which included a terrific audio commentary from Mamet and William H. Macy, a very nice featurette with interviews from most of the major players reflecting on their sometimes career-long collaborations with Mamet and even a gag reel.

Anyway, I thought I'd include a review I wrote of the film some time ago in the hopes it can at least interest one person in buying this early Mamet masterpiece:

In the great race war, Bobby Gold (Joe Mantegna) identifies as a cop. He walks around with his badge proudly displayed on his hip, tells everyone he meets that he's a policeman before even telling them he's name, and repeats his favourite mantra of "I'm just doing my job". He feels so at home at the station that he sleeps, eats, and shaves there changing his clothes in front of the suspects he's interrogating.

But do his colleagues feel the same kind of kinship as Bobby? They're definitely all "hey fellow well-met" types, slapping each other on the back as they tell dirty jokes. Bobby tells his partner, the fiercely red-headed Irishman Sully (William H. Macy) that he is like family to him. "I am your family," replies Sully.

And yet, there's an unspoken divide even in the family of cops. A new breed of college-educated politically correct black senior officers is emerging much to the chagrin of the old-fashioned, two-fisted Irish coppers. Meanwhile, the homicide squad's Italian lieutenant is trying his best to play both sides of the equation.

In that great racial divide, Bobby Gold is a Jew - the only one in the squad - which means he must prove himself again and again. When there's a door to be breached, he must go first. When there's a meeting arranged, he must get there before anyone else. When there's a crime to be solved, he must solve it in record time.

And there is a crime to be solved. Not a flashy one or an interesting one but Bobby gets stuck with it because the victim is Jewish. "She's your people," the lieutenant tells him. "I thought you were my people," Bobby replies.

The old woman's death, however, turns out to be a bit more mysterious than it seemed at first. Before long, Bobby finds himself mixed up with a cloak-and-dagger group of Zionists who have been smuggling guns to Israel since the War of Independence.

To them, Bobby is an easy target. A man with no identity, an inveterate people-pleaser eager to be accepted and suffering with an almost pathological desire to be useful. They give him a spiel about belonging, about Jewishness, and about Israel being his true home and then proceed to use him for their own ends in a way which makes them seem more like the con men from Mamet's "House of Games" than the steadfast protectors of Jewishness they claim to be.

And yet, tired of his colleagues' little Jewish jokes, casual racial slurs, and having to prove himself to them over and over again, Bobby falls for their act hook, line and sinker. Before long, the Zionists are pressuring him to betray his oath to the police and his cop buddies are pressuring him to forget the Jews and come back to work.

Caught between two worlds to which he doesn't fully belong, Bobby Gold finds that he has to solve the biggest mystery of his career - that of his own identity. And yet, as in every David Mamet picture, all the clues are red herrings, all the victims are suspects and all the conclusions lead to blind alleys.

David Mamet's third directorial feature is every bit as energetic, forceful, and stylish as we've come to expect. It's a searing examination of the intriguing and much-debated issue of identity in modern America. Is it truly one nation under god or is it actually a bizarre concoction of different, warring nations constantly torn apart by self-doubt and mutual hatred?

One thing which always impresses me about Mamet's films is the rich, convincing texture of the worlds they inhabit. All of the gambling dens, the drug houses, the dilapidated precincts, and the shadowy diners feel so real, so tangible that you can almost smell them.

Here, he gives us a layered, detailed landscape of the racially charged 1990s. The film keeps cutting between the ghetto slums populated by the impoverished black community and the opulent art deco apartments occupied by rich Jewish families and yet, despite their different social statuses, there is a kinship between the two. A joint trauma of racial hatred emanating through the centuries.

David Mamet is best known for his dialogue and, on that count, "Homicide" may just be his best-written film. He is absolutely at home with the profanity-laden jargon of the streets which he turns into a kind of poetry. A Mamet film avoids the kind of documentarian realism which makes killers, pimps, and drug dealers seem banal and uninteresting. Instead, he gives them lines which are clever, insightful, intelligent, and poetic while still recognisably written in their language. He makes these denizens of the underworld sound like they're quoting R-rated Shakespeare sonnets.

As with any Mamet production, there's a whole bevvy of great supporting performances which add to the aforementioned texture of the piece. The streets, the precincts, and the apartments are occupied by William H. Macy, J.J. Johnston, Rebecca Pidgeon, Natalija Nogulich, and a truly sinister Ricky Jay. The best of them all, in my opinion, is a young Ving Rhames who in a sizzling climactic scene gives Bobby Gold the final push towards self-discovery he so desperately needed.

But Mamet proves himself yet again to be a great filmmaker by never losing track of what "Homicide" actually is about. Even though the film spends a great deal of time examining this tension-filled landscape, it is at its best when it is a sad portrait of a man consumed by self-hatred. Bobby Gold is a great cop, a smart detective, a first-rate hostage negotiator and yet in the film's dazzling climactic scene he refers to himself as a "piece of shit". The thing is that he's also a man who's been put down so much that he's started to believe that he really is worthless.

We've come to know Joe Mantegna as a fast-talking, sharply dressed wiseguy in films like "House of Games" and "The Godfather III". Here he puts in a devastatingly believable portrayal of a broken, lost man desperately in search of a place to belong. It's a career-best performance which has sadly been overlooked.

"Homicide" is structured as a dizzying, labyrinthine murder mystery which corresponds to Bobby's desperate quest for himself. He is yanked from one clue to the next, from one conspiracy to the next, and when everything is eventually revealed there is a devastating moment of recognition which I won't spoil but which is as Umberto Eco as it is David Mamet.