director
Michael
Corrente
screenwriter
David Mamet
based on
his play
producer
Gregory Mosher
cinematographer
Richard Crudo
music
Thomas Newman
editor
Kate Sanford
cast
Dustin Hoffman (Teach)
Dennis Franz (Don)
Sean Nelson (Bobby)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 88m
u.s.
release: September
13, 1996
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
other michael
corrente films
reviewed on this website:
- outside
providence
|
There's
an interesting ongoing pun in American Buffalo that I
wonder if its author, David Mamet, intended. One of the three
characters, the burned-out weasel Teach (Dustin Hoffman), keeps
ranting about two local lesbians, Grace and Ruthie. These women
never appear on screen, but they're never far from Teach's mind:
Grace and Ruthie this, Grace and Ruthie that. By the end of the
movie, we've learned something about Teach: the man is graceless
and ruthless.
American Buffalo itself may be ruthless -- an unblinking
study of trust among bottom dogs -- but graceless it isn't. The
play was David Mamet's Broadway debut, introducing many audiences
to a new species of rhetoric. Men sit and vent about women, food,
the weather, anything. It's the sound of self-defeating machismo
sputtering out in spasms of profanity. Without the precedent
set by Mamet (and also Elmore Leonard), Quentin Tarantino would
still be reminding people to rewind.
The "story" is really a story waiting to happen. We
meet the bedraggled junk-shop owner Donny Dubrow (Dennis Franz),
who's sore about selling a buffalo-head nickel for much less
than he figures it's worth. Donny decides to break into the buyer's
house, stealing back the nickel along with anything else that
might be valuable. His shabby friend Teach wants in on the "shot"
and can't understand why Donny wants to include his younger gofer
Bob (Sean Nelson), possibly a heroin addict. The men go back
and forth; American Buffalo is the clash of two philosophies
-- Donny's "Things are not always what they seem to be"
versus Teach's "Things are what they are." Hoffman
tears into Teach's paranoid tirades like a bull mastiff, while
Franz quietly positions himself as the voice of reason. The drama
becomes a head-butting contest that nobody wins.
This is director Michael Corrente's follow-up to his acclaimed
1994 debut Federal Hill, a good, solid movie that nevertheless
owed a little too much to Mean Streets (and the rest of
the Scorsese portfolio). Like many young male directors, Corrente
loves the verbal shrapnel of street guys, the repetitive obscenities
and homophobic taunts, and American Buffalo has enough
of it for five movies. Mesmerized by the trademark Mamet gutter
poetry, Corrente directs unobtrusively and respectfully.
Maybe too respectfully. At times, American Buffalo
seems like a punk rewrite of Waiting for Godot, and the
staginess of the material shows despite Corrente's sporadic attempts
to "open it out" -- putting Donny and Teach on the
sidewalk, mostly, as if they were dogs needing to pee. At least
Glengarry Glen Ross, another film based on a Mamet play,
had two basic sets; this movie has only a shop, and as much as
I enjoyed the talk and the performances, I can't say I was sorry
to leave the shop. What works on stage doesn't always play well
on screen.
Still, I'm reminded of Pauline Kael's review of The Trojan
Women, a 1972 adaptation of Euripides. Kael said it wasn't
great filmmaking, but it was a welcome chance to see the great
play performed by great actresses. American Buffalo gives
us the great Mamet words spoken by great actors. That's enough. |
