Debased Debate

I recently saw a production of Speed-the-Plow. While it's fun, and full of David Mamet's highly artificial "naturalistic" dialogue, it does have a major weakness. (The same flaw is found in Oleanna--and no, I don't mean needlessly obscure titles.) The female character, and the argument she represents, is too weak.

The play is about two Hollywood producers who are going to become rich and powerful by making a by-the-numbers action film. But a temp secretary convinces one of them to instead greenlight a serious novel about the end of the world.

Now there are plenty of possibilities here to contrast art versus mindless entertainment, but Mamet doesn't make it a fair fight. The two male characters are awful people--crass and narcissistic--but they've got life and are fun to watch. Meanwhile, the woman is fairly annoying and inarticulate when it comes to explaining how she feels. Worse, what we hear about the novel--it's all poetic nonsense about radiation and high-flown feelings--makes it sound ridiculous. Mamet should have at least made it appear the book might make a good film, rather than something so pretentious we'd long for a bad action film.

(I thought Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze handled this problem better in Adaptation, where Donald Kaufman's script-within-the-film may be crass, but we can almost believe it's the kind of thing that Hollywood, and Robert McKee, would approve of. And we can question if "Charlie Kaufman" knows so much more than his brother.)