Interview. Chiwetel Ejiofor.

Fresh off its premiere at Tribeca, David Mamet's Redbelt sees a limited opening this weekend before screening at the San Francisco International Film Festival and opening wider on May 9.

Sean Axmaker introduces his interview with Chiwetel Ejiofor: "His body language and his carriage are essential to the way he inhabits his characters, whether they are calm and controlled men of strength and determination (Children of Men and Serenity) or casual and easygoing in volatile situations (Inside Man and American Gangster). His presence and his physical interactions with other characters define his character, Mike Terry, even more than Mamet's marvelous dialogue."

Updated through 5/4.

"So how's the Mamet Rocky?" asks David Edelstein in New York. "Fast. Lively. In your face. Very watchable. And, like its predecessors, so bizarrely convoluted it barely holds together on a narrative level. But the underpinnings are consistent. As Mamet has evolved into a confident and resourceful film director, his worldview has hardly budged.... Ejiofor is a great Mamet spokesman. He internalizes the lines - he internalizes everything - so you're not aware of all the finicky punctuation. Like Forest Whitaker, in Jim Jarmusch's ludicrous Ghost Dog, he can speak of the spirit and honor of the samurai without making you long for John Belushi."

"In the context of David Mamet's directorial career, Redbelt breaks no ground, signals no new direction, adds nothing to what he's done at the typewriter and behind the camera thus far," writes Michael Joshua Rowin in the L Magazine. "In taking up where 2004's largely ignored Spartan left off, Redbelt instead merely reconfirms the pros and cons of Mamet's unique brand of tough-guy dramatics."

"David Mamet may not be the visual stylist that Jean-Pierre Melville was, but in most other respects, his Redbelt is faithfully cast in the tradition of the great French auteur's Le Samouraï," argues Nick Schager in Slant. This is "a precise, invigorating portrait of the difficulty and nobility of remaining true to oneself."

"All fighters are sad." In the New York Times, Mamet himself recalls three examples: Stanislaus Zbyszko in Night and the City, Kola Kwariani in The Killing and Takashi Shimura in Seven Samurai.

"Chiwetel Ejiofor brings [to] his role a strong presence and the ability to convey complex thought and emotional storms going on beneath a placid surface," writes Phil Nugent in ScreenGrab. "He deserves a lot of credit for not appearing ridiculous when his character pounds away at the jujitsu formula that appears to be his all-purpose mantra for life: 'There is no situation you can't escape from. There is no situation you can't turn to your advantage.'"

Updates: Andrew O'Hehir's "advice is this: Don't give up the day job, Dave. The whole thing with misanthropic plays that bit your middle-class audience in the ass - that was working much better. Mamet turned up briefly onstage at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center to introduce the movie, and at age 60, with a full gray beard and translucent horn-rimmed spectacles, he now bears a totally unexpected resemblance to Allen Ginsberg. If you follow such things, you may have noticed that Mamet recently declared that his politics have diverged pretty far from, say, Allen Ginsberg's. But even I do not think it's fair to blame the badness of Redbelt on Republican ideology."

"[B]y my sights, the first 74 minutes of this 99 minute picture constitute Mamet's best effort as a film writer/director since, well, maybe, his indelible film writing/directing debut, 1987's House of Games," writes Premiere's Glenn Kenny. "Now, as you may have inferred, that is not to deny that there is a falloff, and that the falloff takes place not long after the 74th minute. And yes... that is true. But, by my sights, it's not nearly as egregious a falloff as the one that completely sunk Mamet's last film as writer/director, 2004's Spartan. For whatever its flaws, Redbelt offers up a good deal of Mametian red meat while also trying to break out of some of the strictures that Mamet's erected around his own work."

Update, 4/30: "Neither oppressive nor subtle in its symmetries, Redbelt is a cleanly constructed piece of work," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "In press notes so long, detailed, and repetitive they could only have been supervised by Mamet himself, the filmmaker is identified as a longtime student of, and purple belt in, jujitsu. Thus, Redbelt is a personal statement, as well as a sort of naturalized kung fu western and revisionist Popular Front boxing drama."

Updates, 5/2: Paul Matwychuk has the most fun review of Redbelt you'll read.

"In Redbelt, David Mamet has taken a sturdy B-movie conceit - a good man versus the bad world, plus blood - tricked it out with his rhythms, his corrosive words and misanthropy, and come up with a satisfying, unexpectedly involving B-movie that owes as much to old Hollywood as to Greek tragedy," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "That may sound like a perilous combination, but the film's visual moderation, contained scale and ambition keep it well tethered."

"What I like about David Mamet's movies is how lean and propulsive his characters are - clipped and sure of themselves," writes Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook. "Not particularly cinematic, clearly existing on the page through dialog and the determination of action through written word, it is nevertheless refreshing to see a film like Mamet's great Spartan (2004) and his less impressive Redbelt and hear someone speak. Because from the look of the actor and the shine of the words, we can know all there is to know about the character."

"In many ways [Mamet's] most straightforward film, Redbelt is a ruthlessly executed tale of cloistered warrior honor exposed to the open air of a fallen world," writes Nicolas Rapold in the New York Sun. "In other words, it's an old samurai story, but Mr Mamet's clockwork mechanism is downright cathartic and his leading man, Chiwetel Ejiofor, is charismatic enough to watch indefinitely."

For James Rocchi, writing at Cinematical, it's "not as impressive or thought-provoking as some of his other dramatic works, like Glengarry Glen Ross or House of Games or Oleanna; at the same time, it's an exciting, engaging mix of drama and action supported by an immensely appealing lead performance by Chiwitel Ejiofor."

"Redbelt is Mamet's richest film of the decade," declares Tasha Robinson at the AV Club.

Redbelt is "a contemporary noir with a samurai movie interior, as sincere, plaintive and strangely optimistic a movie as [Mamet's] made," writes Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times.

"[T]he film's intricate plot begins to collapse the moment the lights come up and you begin thinking about the story," writes Alonso Duralde for MSNBC.

"Mamet's self-seriousness stifles Redbelt's cinematic potential," argues Armond White in the New York Press.

Updates, 5/4: "Docile when you want it to snarl, slovenly when you expect it tighten, Redbelt is a confounder," writes Justin Stewart in Stop Smiling.

"The movie is my love letter to the world and philosophy of jiu-jitsu," Mamet tells Chris Lee in the Los Angeles Times.

Posted by dwhudson at April 28, 2008 12:41 AM