By Shamrock McShane, June 2008

Redbelt is David Mamet’s new movie. He’s the writer, the director and the star, even though he’s not seen in the movie. The same way Ingmar Bergman is the star of a Bergman movie and Godard a Godard movie.

By force of will, Mamet — essayist, playwright and screenwriter — is a filmmaker to be mentioned in the same breath with Bergman and Godard. He freely admits that he has no natural affinity for telling a story in pictures rather than words.

Redbelt is one of Mamet’s best movies because it packs an emotional punch – a trait more common to Mamet screenplays directed by masters such as Bob Rafelson (The Postman Always Rings Twice), Sidney Lumet (The Verdict), and Brian DePalma (The Untouchables). Redbelt is much more than just a con game. The metaphor of the martial artist serves Mamet’s aesthetic, and vice versa.

David Mamet is one of the world’s great playwrights. In Chicago he is simply called the Great Man. I’ve got news for the Great Man, he’s wasting his time making movies.

Not that his movies aren’t damn good — not that some of his movies aren’t even better than some of his plays — it’s just that the world wages war on its artists, and Mamet, brave man that he is, though he battles on, is in a war of attrition and eventually he must succumb. He lives now in a world where one is rewarded for wasting time.

And I mean that Mamet is wasting his time, not ours.

Mamet has a simple and effective way for handling his critics. It’s show and tell. Here’s his work of art, and here’s your criticism. He’s willing to put his name on his art. Now, you put your name on your critique and we’ll call it square. Come back in a hundred years and see who’s right.

One big difference between the golden age of Chicago theater in the 1970s and the Lost Generation in Paris in the 1920s was that those earlier guys had been to war. Most of the players on the Street — as Lincoln Avenue, the theater district in Chicago — is called, had missed out on the Vietnam War, coming up winners in the Draft Lottery.

With Redbelt, a movie about Brazilian jujitsu, Mamet has imagined truly. Not the fight stuff, which is deftly done but requires no imagination, just know- how. No, what Mamet imagines truly is the pressure to compromise on the common man, the hard-rock reality of the rent due in a time of unexpected crisis, the bills that pile on like a free for all.

As the fighters before a bout are enjoined, Mamet does fight fair, clean and hard. Although that makes the scenes laugh-lean, in return we are graced with a bravura performance by Chiwetel Ejiofor. Ejiofor embodies Mamet’s hero, not just because the man is a Shakespearean-trained actor who can really fight, but because he resolutely faces down Mamet himself, who plots his dramas as if he were his own antagonist.

Mamet’s alter ego in Redbelt is the action movie star Chet Frank, convincingly played by Tim Allen.

“I never served,” he feels obliged to confide to every Army Man he meets. “I got lucky.”

Mamet’s ensemble creates a world of antagonists. Joe Mantegna, Ricky Jay and David Paymer are at the top of their slick game. For old pros, there’s no beating Jack Wallace and J.J. Johnston, who have been with the Mamet troupe since the St. Nicholas Theater in 1973.

The Mamet Distaff Players, providing depth on the team as Teach would have it, feature facile performances from Emily Mortimer, Alice Braga and Rebecca Pidgeon.

For wordplay like swordplay, there is a scene of dueling lawyers out of court that rivals the fight scenes for brilliance and panache.

As noted, Mamet cruised through the last century unscathed. Great American Playwrights of the 20th century: O’Neil, Williams, Miller, Albee, Mamet.

Chances are, Mamet will never write another play as good as American Buffalo or Glengarry Glen Ross. He can’t. He doesn’t live those plays anymore. He’s not 20 years old, hanging out in the back room of the pool hall smoking cigars, or riding in the club car, smoking cigarettes over scotch and shooting the breeze.

And it’s not just that he’s too old. Although 60 is just a whippersnapper’s age for a writer, Mamet’s got a lot of mileage on him. He’s so far away from the Old Neighborhood now it’s not even funny.

And there’s no going back.

Like it says on the matchbook, Close Cover Before Striking.  Sometimes to go forward, you have to go back. But Mamet didn’t go back to The Old Neighborhood. Instead, he made something up.

That’s his prerogative. It’s been pretty much downhill ever since.

But that’s how you build momentum. Mamet’s got a play on Broadway now – a political farce called November, starring Nathan Lane. The reviews have been mixed. Doesn’t matter. You can’t hurt the Great Man.

Last month Mamet proclaimed his disenchantment with liberalism in an essay for the Village Voice called “Why I am No Longer a Brain-dead Liberal.” That doesn’t mean Mamet is a Conservative. It just means he’s Something Else.

David Mamet steadfastly refuses to write the play you want him to.

What do you expect him to do? Give up? Kill himself? Things aren’t that bad. He’s happily married to the beautiful and talented Rebecca Pidgeon. He calls his own tune in Hollywood, New York, London, you name it. He has life long buddies like Joey Mantegna and William H. Macy and Steven Schachter, a list too long to recount here, an ensemble who love him and love his work and love to work with him.

Because in the end the work is all that really matters.