Thursday, Dec. 09, 2010
Mistakes Were Made
Michael Shannon (an Oscar nominee for Revolutionary Road and co-star of HBO's Boardwalk Empire) plays a desperate theater producer glued to his telephone headset, furiously trying to keep a dozen errant balls in the air as he struggles to prevent a shaky Broadway project about the French Revolution from crashing. Craig Wright's satire of showbiz phoniness is pretty familiar, but there's enough perplexing filigree (a hostage crisis in Iraq, a hungry tropical fish in the office) to make Mistakes Were Made far more than an extended episode of Entourage. And Shannon's nerve-racking, no-holds-barred performance as the type-A-plus producer is brilliant.