Release Date: May 2
Director: David Mamet
Writer: David Mamet
Cinematographer: Robert Elswit
Starring: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Emily Mortimer, Alice Braga, Joe Mantegna
Studio/Run Time: Sony Pictures Classics, 99 mins.
David Mamet’s new jiu-jitsu movie, Redbelt, may seem like a detour from the director’s usual fare into the world of sports thrillers, but fear not. Mamet has yet to encounter a reel of film or page of drama that can’t be filled with con men and macho posturing, and they’re both here. The plot folds in on itself, the dialogue arrives in staccato bursts, and Ricky Jay delivers explanations with a grimy, albeit weary, menace. It’s Mamet, all right.
But all of the tropes that make Redbelt comfortable and efficient also make it a little too familiar. Mamet takes such interest in the clock-like mechanisms of shady enterprises that his meticulous depictions are a joy to behold, and yet we can see most of them coming well before they arrive.
Mike Terry (Chiwetel Ejiofor) runs a jiu-jitsu school where he trains his students, some of whom are police officers, in hand-to-hand combat and self-defense. He’s a purist, not a competitor, but the seedy worlds of moviemaking and tournament sport—commercial ventures that are at odds with the low-key tone of his near-bankrupt school—eventually begin to tug at his hard-won black belt, with less than noble intentions. I especially like the way the movie world runs parallel to the corrupt grudge match; it’s glittery and alluring, but it’s connected to all the same villains.
In March, Mamet caused a stir by publishing “an election-season essay” in the Village Voice in which he renounced liberalism in favor of conservatism, and it’s hard not to see Redbelt—his first movie or play to appear since the essay—in light of that conversion. If parts of Redbelt seem hokey, it may be because Mamet no longer believes them. Terry avoids sport and fame in favor of principle, even when it doesn’t pay the bills, even when it threatens to destroy him. In a scene as preposterous as they come, he peers into the arena’s back rooms and sees the management’s sleight of hand, quite literally. Perhaps it’s new Mamet’s critique of a manipulated market, but I suspect it’s the tossed-off concession to an old view.
That lack of conviction at the film’s core leaves viewers with little beyond the admittedly enjoyable surface: a few good fights, a few contrived but precisely executed plot turns, and an impending doom that his characters sense but refuse to accept. The film hesitates, and softens its punches, like a lily-livered white belt.