GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS

I've seen this Pulitzer Prize winning play by David Mamet (about real estate salesmen) twice in the theatre, including its initial run at the National Theatre when it blew me away.  

This adaptation (by Mamet himself) has an ensemble cast so strong that fine actors such as Ed Harris and Alan Arkin only get to play minor roles. 

The cast also includes Alec Baldwin who gets just the one scene, especially written by Mamet for the film, as a guy from head office trying to kick some life into the team by threatening them with the sack. 

There’s also Kevin Spacey, well cast as the office manager who is despised by all the salesmen, Jonathan Pryce, terrific as a hapless customer trying to back out of his “investment”, and Al Pacino as the smooth salesman determined to stop him doing so.  

It’s an understated and effective performance by Pacino, and his best scene is one where he and Jack Lemmon improvise a way of bamboozling Pryce.

Which brings us to the outstanding performance on view, namely Lemmon’s, playing easily the most complex and intriguing character.

On the one hand he has our sympathy as an aging salesman who is past his best, and who desperately needs money to pay his daughter’s medical bills. 

Yet he also makes it easy to imagine that when he was younger and more successful he would have been hard to like, simply a cocksure salesman crowing about his successes.

Appropriately it is his keenness to lord it over Spacey’s character when things at last seem to be going his way that leads to his downfall.

Lemmon won a prize at the Venice Film Festival for his performance but somehow didn’t even get nominated for an Oscar, a staggering oversight.

Even if you watched this film without knowing its provenance you’d easily guess it was originally a play, given the claustrophobic setting and the relentless dialogue which despite the constant profanity makes little pretence at being naturalistic.

The director is no one of any note, and he doesn’t bring much to the table.  Maybe he doesn’t need to, given the quality of the screenplay and of the performances.  Yet I ended up feeling that an opportunity had been missed, that a better director might have found some way to make this more cinematic. 

Even so it’s undoubtedly high class entertainment.

RATING: ✓✓ Catch It If You Can