(4 of 4)
For Mamet fans, Speed-the-Plow will recall many of the pleasures of Glengarry. Both center on salesmen who have no skill except persuasion, no talent but for heightened, theatrical speech and naked yet manipulative emotional outbursts. Although Mamet is highly literary -- he reads widely, and the script for Speed-the-Plow has an epigraph from Thackeray's Pendennis -- few of his witticisms translate well into print, because he does not write rounded, formal speeches. The movie men in Speed-the-Plow, much like the thugs in American Buffalo (1975), the actors in A Life in the Theater (1977) and the singles-bar habitues of Sexual Perversity in Chicago, erupt naturalistically in fragments, in repetitions, in overlapping counterpoint of threats and expostulations and profuse four-letter words. Their conversation sounds authentic, yet is so idiosyncratic to its author that a couple of minutes suffice to identify it as his. This quicksilver gift of language, joined with an almost infinite slyness about the tricky uses to which words can be put, makes Mamet a superb entertainer. He is a sort of American version of Harold Pinter, but funnier, raunchier and with a keener sense of the particularities of time and place.
What is troubling in his work is a moral ambiguity that verges on cynicism, coupled with a high-minded tone that verges on sanctimony. In The Untouchables he claimed the authority of history to invent a fictitiously murderous Eliot Ness and, worse, a guilty plea made for Al Capone by his attorney against the mobster's will. That is something that could not happen in any court still observing the fundamentals of the Constitution. In Speed-the-Plow Mamet makes the unastonishing revelation that movie moguls are venal and pandering. Perhaps he means to prick spectators' consciences by holding them responsible for the box-office triumph of trivia over moral concern.
But just as the audience and, seemingly, the playwright himself cannot decide whether the laughable-sounding book under consideration is insight or eyewash, so it is hard to say whether Speed-the-Plow is an outcry against Hollywood or a cynical apologia from a man who, in real life, is finishing one Hollywood film and about to start another. Mamet has said that by being oblique, even obscure, he forces spectators to think. At least some playgoers, however, yearn for a writer straightforward enough to have the courage of his own convictions.