In what is perhaps his most technically skilled piece of writing, Mamet gave us a superbly accurate glimpse into the fearful steps toward armistice in the Gender War as it was perceived to be happening in the early nineties. By locking the two combatants in the same room with high stakes on the table for hours on end he was able to magnify the fears behind their bluffs and the rage behind their acquiescence. On the page the author held a mirror up to the hypocrisy of both sides and refused to let it go. Moreover with a skillful interweaving of speech, he turned the cacaphony of an argument into a symphony of discontent. Then came the movie... Apparently not trusting his own skill as a writer, of the laudable talent of his actors, here directs practically by metronome, locking his actors into a simple rhymic recitation of the lines. The overall effect being that every syllable of this immense work is illuminated for our examination, and it is boring. Mamet himself once commented that cinema was a melodramatic art form and he would rather read anything even the dictionary than go to a movie which tried to make him think. Then he yanked the guts and lifeblood out of this potent script and left the rest like a fossilized remnant of what it could have been. A shame.
