Heist
By Danny Sarnowski

Almost every world that playwright/writer/director David Mamet creates is a man’s world. They are manly worlds inhabited by manly men doing manly things. These are worlds filled with crime, fear, anger, lust, distrust, and illusion. They are seedy worlds filled with desperate characters, grasping for something unattainable, something above their station or beyond their grasp. Women do play roles in these worlds, but they are not, under any circumstances, to be trusted. Mamet has created some of these manly worlds in films such as The Edge, The Untouchables, House of Games, The Spanish Prisoner, Ronin, and Glengarry Glen Ross. The world that he manufactures in his new thriller Heist is such a world. Danger, crime, and the age-old doublecross are no strangers here.

Heist centers on Joe (played by Gene Hackman, who is at the top of his game here), an aging thief whose only desire is to get out of the game and sail away with this pixie wife Fran (played by Mamet’s own wife Rebecca Pidgeon). While pulling off a jewel heist, Joe “gets burnt,” meaning that his face is scene by a video camera. The job is finished, the loot is taken, but the cops now have Joe’s face. It is finally time to set sail. Or so Joe thinks.

His crooked fence (played menacingly by Danny De Vito) refuses to pay Joe or his crew their cut of the jewel heist unless he agrees to do “the Swiss thing.” Joe refuses saying he needs to leave town, but De Vito makes it plainly clear that Joe needs to do this job. Not only is he going to have to do this “thing,” but he’s also going to have to do it with De Vito’s hothead nephew (played by Sam Rockwell) along for the ride. Joe assembles his team of Fran, Bobby Blane (Delroy Lindo), and Pinky Pincus (Mamet favorite Ricky Jay) and sets to work. They have a plan, you see. A plan to steal a load of Swiss gold. The plan is so perfect that De Vito says “if I was a publisher, I’d publish the plan.” When asked why he doesn’t just publish the plan he says, “yeah, well, I’m a thief. So I have to do the other thing.”

One of Mamet’s trademarks is the dialogue. The wonderful, weird, completely Mametian dialogue. His characters speak in cadences and phrases that nobody in their right mind speaks in and it’s great to hear. You cut out all of the pictures and just listen to this movie and it would still work. Lines like “my man is so cool, when he goes to bed sheep count him” are thrown about between the characters. When told that he is not going to be shot by another character, Joe says “He isn’t gonna shoot me? Then he hadn’t oughta point a gun at me. It’s insincere.”

The movie unfolds slowly, but in calculated steps. One lie builds on another. One doublecross bleeds through to two more. Who is playing who? Who is going to get away with the gold? For a movie devoid of any special effects, for a movie without big budget nonsense and a Top 40 soundtrack, it holds our attention. It keeps us guessing and hoping and rooting for Joe and his team. As with any Mamet film, what you see is not always the whole story. You can’t ever be sure that the end is really here until it’s here.

Heist delivers on all fronts. It has the dialogue, the tricks and turns, and the incredible performances by a top-notch cast. In a time when many actors are phoning in performances in trite, effects-driven movies, it’s such a joy to see talented people working with a quality script under the direction of someone who clearly understands and enjoys telling stories. It’s just too bad that movies like Heist are as rare as they are.

7 February 2002