Oleanna (1994)

Director: David Mamet
Starring: William H. Macy, Debra Eisenstadt

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Ya know, sometimes I can take Mamet and sometimes I can't. I enjoyed the hell out of State & Main and The Spanish Prisoner, but I was only somewhat entertained by Heist. It's always easy to tell when you're watching a Mamet movie because of the ultra stylized way the actors deliver the dialogue, but these other movies masked it much better than in Oleanna. That kind of shit might work on stage, but it doesn't translate to film. Mamet obviously wants us to realize that we are not watching a reality; we are watch Drama, a Drama that has Characters. You're going to sit and listen to the glory that is The Writer. Maybe I've been too ingrained with the notion of Fellini's ringmaster that I don't understand the writer's pedestal in theatre. Now, we film people have had intentional rupture before. I'll just go ahead and point to the French New Wave and every school that followed in their footsteps. For me, Oleanna was like a mix between the New Wave (and its drawing attention to the artifice of the medium) and a more naturalistic theatrical film, Richard Linklater's Tape. Instead of using jump cuts or medium specific self-referentiality, he uses the dialogue to prevent the viewer from engaging too closely with the characters in the film. The elements of the film remind me very much of a theory about the movement of atoms and how, if given a machine that could measure this movement of every atom in the universe for an instant, one could determine everything that happened that had happened in the past and everything that will happen in the future. The elements of the film in this case being the two archetype characters and the enclosed setting. After seeing the first plot twist, there's no reason to watch the rest of the film. It's all pre-determination at this point, and once we're given that instant to measure the atoms there's no reason to keep watching. My overall impression is negative because I didn't like feeling like I was observing two insects in a terrarium. I just don't like people--even fictional people--being treated as science projects.

July 3
apartment TV, early morning

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