by Miguel E. Rodriguez
DIRECTOR: David Mamet
CAST: Joe Mantegna, William H. Macy, Ving Rhames, Rebecca Pidgeon
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 88% Fresh
PLOT: A Jewish homicide detective investigates a seemingly minor murder and falls in with a Zionist group as a result.
Homicide is one of those movies where the lead character experiences just one damn thing after another until he winds up in a situation that is not even barely hinted at in the film’s first half hour. If I didn’t think it was being a little pretentious – and maybe if I understood the term just a little more – I’d call it Kafkaesque. It reminds me a bit of Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, where that lead character is drawn unwittingly into the unexplored jungles of New York City at night. Likewise, Detective Bobby Gold (Joe Mantegna) starts the film on a manhunt, searching for a wanted killer, and thirty-six hours later winds up begging Zionist activists to let him be involved in blowing up a storefront suspected of printing Nazi pamphlets.
In other hands, the events of the film leading up to Gold’s digression into racial/social activism could come off as comic. First, he’s put on the manhunt case, searching for a man named Randolph. Then a weirdo booked for killing his family wigs out at the station and attacks Gold, ripping the strap off his holster, and giving him a bump on the head that’s visible for the rest of the movie. (I was unavoidably reminded of Jake Gittes’s nose in Chinatown. Both wounds serve as constant reminders of either the odds the characters face or of the unpredictability of the world they inhabit.) On their way to interrogate Randolph’s mother for his whereabouts, Gold and his partner, Sullivan (William H. Macy), randomly run into what looks like a hostage situation which turns out to be a cop cornered by a vicious dog in a candy store. In the store is a dead woman. The commanding sergeant arrives at the scene and gives Gold the dead woman case. Turns out the dead woman is Jewish. Her family shows up at the scene, learns Gold is Jewish, and insist he be their personal liaison for the case. Meanwhile, Sullivan has to carry on with the Randolph case on his own. A recurring theme will be how Gold keeps missing out on important events with the Randolph case while babysitting the family of the dead woman, a case he considers unimportant.
What happens next unfolds so naturally and surprisingly that I will not spoil it for you. What I will say is that Mamet turns a standard police procedural into a searing character study of a man who has never really considered who he is in terms of his heritage. At one point, he speaks with a Jewish scholar who shows him a page of Hebrew text. Gold says, “I can’t read it.” The scholar tells him, “You say you’re a Jew and you can’t read Hebrew. What are you then?” This is a question that Gold will try to answer for the rest of the film.
On a personal note, that bit of dialogue resonated quite a bit with me. I’m full-blooded Puerto Rican on both sides of my family. Yet my knowledge of Spanish is barely passable. When faced with reading Spanish text, I can sound out the words, but my comprehension level is probably only 60 to 70%. My conversation with fluent Spanish speakers is halting, at best. I just never took the time to learn it as thoroughly as my parents or my sister did. Does that make me any less Puerto Rican? I don’t think so, and I might feel resentment towards a stranger telling me that I’m not Puerto Rican just because I don’t speak Spanish. I know who and what I am, and my identity is not tied to what language I speak.
But things are different for Detective Gold. Earlier in the film, he talks to his partner, Sullivan, on the phone and talks about how the Jewish family he’s now working for, or with, are high-strung, crying wolf (they claim someone is shooting at them from the building next door, but there are no bullet holes to prove it), how they saved ten bucks a week by letting the old lady work at the store herself, how they’re “not MY people, baby.” Only after he realizes he’s been overheard does he feel immense guilt and obligation to help the family. Not to just solve the case, but to “find the killer.” So, he’s experiencing all sorts of new emotions that may or may not be interfering with his ability to do his job impassively.
The people in Homicide sound as if they are speaking in subtext only, using Mamet’s unique writing style to bypass what we think of as “normal” speech and deliver lines that are almost poetic, even when laced with racial epithets and curse words. This makes the overall tone of any Mamet-scripted film seem hyper-stylized, as if the characters are one level removed from reality, but not in a bad way. It elevates the film somehow. I’m at a loss to describe it more accurately.
One bit of dialogue exemplifies what I’m talking about. Gold is being thrown out of a building. The gentleman at the door tells him, “Don’t bother to return. The next time you come, there’ll be nobody here.” Don’t bother to return? That’s unnecessarily decorous. “Normal” conversation would be something like, “Don’t bother coming back. If you do, we won’t be here.” However, Mamet’s signature word choices here suggest an almost Shakesperean construction, as if the words are being shoehorned into a buried structure or pattern that operates subconsciously. Based on what happens with Gold throughout the film, I could theorize that Mamet is trying to create a mood reminiscent of Greek tragedy, and the actors are reciting dialogue that has been translated from Greek or some other language.
But that’s just me.
The experience of watching Homicide will never be quite as exciting or kinetic as other superlative crime dramas like, say, Heat or The Departed, movies that also examine their characters in detail, sending them on similar journeys of self-discovery. Those other movies are defined as much by their action as by their intelligence. In Homicide, any “standard” action scenes are purely incidental, or sometimes accidental, intended not to thrill but to move the plot forward with a minimum of fuss.
In any event, the action is not the linchpin of this film. We watch Homicide, not to see who Gold kills or who tries to kill Gold, but to see if he is capable of resurrecting the person within himself that he thought he had killed long ago, a sacrifice he made on the altar of being a good cop. He has a painful conversation where he realizes that everything he’s done to suppress his own self has been, “Not for me. All for someone else.” He must decide whether to act in service of his conscience or his sworn duty as a cop. The choices he makes have consequences he never anticipated, as with all good tragedies. Homicide reminds us of that inescapable fact, not with a bang or a whimper, but with the calm, flat gaze of an impassive Greek god who lets us draw our own conclusions.
2 UNPAID MOVIE CRITICS!!!! 