Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #103 Heist (2001)
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.
I also recently began an even more screamingly essential deep dive into the complete filmography of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen.
Alternately, you can be like one generous soul and commission a batch of Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 pieces around a particular actor without committing to covering their whole career. I recently wrote about Ruthless People for a patron who had issues with the films I chose for Danny DeVito month and now I’m writing about David Mamet’s 2001 crime movie Heist.
With Heist the aging Enfant terrible of American theater went mainstream with a generously budgeted, star-powered action movie about a robbery gone awry that’s shockingly eager to entertain and asks surprisingly little of the audience for a David Mamet production.
It’s as if Mamet has a secret, Donald Kaufman-like identical twin who’s just like him only a total hack and commercial to a pathological degree and the Glengarry Glen Ross playwright let him write Heist for a big Hollywood payday so he could devote his time to writing plays.
Heist rides This Is Spinal Tap’s fine line between stupid and clever for 109 breezily entertaining minutes. Mamet has seldom been quite this exquisitely, transcendently dopey. Heist is highly quotable but not necessarily for the right reasons. Throughout the film I found myself jotting down particularly ripe zingers not out of admiration and a desire to share the film’s wit and wisdom than a slack-jawed sense of astonishment that such a famously smart, virtuoso writer could pen so much banter that feels so fucking stupid.
Take perhaps the movie’s most famous, iconic line of dialogue: “Everybody needs money. That’s why they call it money.” Danny DeVito’s cold-blooded fence delivers the line with palpable delight, albeit in a way that cannot quite obscure the fact that while that pithy aphorism sounds vaguely meaningful and clever it doesn’t actually mean anything.
“Everybody needs money. That’s why they call it money” is like a lot of Mamet’s dialogue here: either extraordinarily clever or shockingly stupid or both at the same time. Mamet’s ridiculously hyper-stylized tough guy banter lustily embraces self-parody.
When DeVito’s apoplectic antagonist fumes, “Lemme add this sweetener: you do the fuckin' job, or else I'm gonna turn you over. I'm gonna drop a Roosevelt dime on your ass. 'Finita la commedia.' How strict is that, you fuckin' vontz? I'm sorry that I hafta use such language in front of a woman, were it not for whom I'd waste your fucking ass” he seems to be channeling Troy Duffy.
More twists than a BAG of pretzels indeed!
When a cool customer played by, of all people, Ricky Jay says of Gene Hackman’s mastermind, “My motherfucker is so cool, when he goes to bed, sheep count him” he reminded me of Sphinx, the guru in Mystery Men who similarly spouts backward aphorisms that sound profound but are ultimately nonsensical.
Heist has one huge asset in Gene Hackman, whose career as a leading man was winding to a a close when this was one of four movies he appeared in during a very eventful 2001, the others being The Mexican, Heartbreakers and, most auspiciously, The Royal Tenenbaums.
The Royal Tenenbaums would have been a fine swan song for one of the greatest actors and movie stars of the 20th century but Hackman had the supremely questionable judgment to stay in the game long enough to end things with 2005’s Welcome to Mooseport. It’s almost better to go out on an abomination like Stanley Donen’s final feature film, Blame It on Rio, or Sean Connery’s perversely bleak CGI romp Sir Billi than a movie like Welcome to Mooseport that no one remembers.
Hackman brings an automatic authenticity to the lead role of Joe Moore, a veteran thief who has stayed out of prison by being very smart and very cautious. So when he’s spotted by both a witness and a camera during a robbery, he decides it’s a good time to get out of the business and enjoy his boat and much younger wife.
The role of Fran Moore, Hackman’s much younger wife, a tomboy bombshell femme fatale whose smoldering sexuality and powerhouse charisma clouds the judgment of multiple men is played, of course, by Rebecca Pidgeon, who is best known for starring in all of Mamet’s movies because she’s his wife and a strong living argument against nepotism.
There are three big problems with Pidgeon here. First, she’s all wrong for the role. Put a young Angelina Jolie in the movie and suddenly you’ve got a crowd-pleaser that’ll gross 100 million dollars and not just perform reasonably well for a David Mamet movie. Secondly, Pidgeon just isn’t a very good actress. Third, the role of the irresistibly sexy, badass female lead calls for a movie star and a movie star Pidgeon most assuredly is not.
Executive: This is a remarkable cast we’ve assembled. Truly world class. Hackman is one of the greats. But it all hinges on the female lead. Who do you see for the role? David Mamet: (Borat voice) My wife!
It would be unfair to say that Heist would be improved immeasurably by anyone else as the female lead but there are literally countless actresses who would have done better. Hell, I would rather see Tanya Roberts or Tawny Kitaen in the role than Pidgeon. At least that would be a nice change of pace.
Our hero’s sleepy retirement plans hit a snag when his longtime fence Mickey Bergman (Danny DeVito, having way too much fun) insists that he and his crew pull off one last job with the help of his mustachioed nephew Jimmy Silk (Sam Rockwell).
I’m not saying that Rockwell’s character is suspicious from the very get-go but in high school he was voted most likely to double-cross his crew during a heist. There are few surer bets in entertainment than Sam Rockwell playing a sleaze bag, particularly one with unflattering facial hair. Heist is full of breezy pleasures, most notably in the infectious pleasure Hackman, Rockwell, Jay, DeVito and Delroy Lindo (a consummate professional as always as a fiery veteran member of Joe’s crew) take in delivering some of the pulpiest, flashiest and most ostentatious dialogue of Mamet’s long career in theater and film.
We know Jimmy Silk is going to be a belligerent, dangerous fly in the ointment for the following reasons
His name is Jimmy Silk
He’s played by Sam Rockwell
He has a sinister mustache
There’s always a belligerent, dangerous fly in the ointment in movies like this and it’s usually exactly who you think it is.
With Silk in the mix, it’s not a question of whether the wild card will betray his criminal associates in his mad quest for money and power but when and how. The airplane heist for Swiss gold is complicated of course by Jimmy’s duplicity and the requisite supply of double crosses and twists.
Heist is as Hollywood as Mamet gets. It’s a brash, glibly diverting piece of entertainment redeemed in no small part by a cast uniquely gifted at turning Mamet’s occasionally tin-eared dialogue into gold.
I initially worried that Heist would be like a lot of the movies I covered for Danny DeVito month in featuring him not as a star but rather as either a minor supporting player or a glorified cameo. After delivering the line about money DeVito disappears from the film for long stretches but he has a wonderful showcase late in the film where he menaces Joe with attitude and words and henchmen despite being a tiny little man, as physically unimposing as movie stars come.
With Heist, Mamet set out to dazzle and delight with some of his showiest, most flamboyant dialogue to date. Despite an extraordinary cast, he largely failed on that level. He also set out to make a movie that was just plain entertaining in a way that didn’t tax the intellect of the audience too much. On that front he largely succeeded.
Watch out! He’s got a gun! And a mustache!
Heist is Mamet’s top-grossing film as a director. It grossed nearly thirty million dollars at the box-office but because it cost nearly forty million dollars, it ended up losing money in its theatrical release.
It fared much better on home video, where, according to Wikipedia, it has more than doubled its theatrical haul, making over seventy million dollars on DVD and Blu-Ray.
That seems fitting, since Heist is what We Hate Movies would call a hangover movie. It’s entertaining enough, well acted and nicely paced, albeit perversely light on both surprises and suspense for a heist movie from David Mamet.
The unexpectedness slightness of Heist proves both a gift and a curse. It succeeds in no small part because its ambitions are so modest but I can’t help but think that this cast and this filmmaker could have done a lot better than the kind of trifle you end up watching on basic cable on the weekend because you have nothing better to do.
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