It isn’t often that a single film includes so many top-paragraph-in-the-obituary performances, but the cast of Glengarry Glen Ross seems to draw out the most from one another, as if they keep setting and resetting the high bar. Kevin Spacey and Al Pacino in Glengarry Glen Ross. But Mamet respects their esprit de corps, too, built on a shared sense of dignity as men. It’s an imperative that they live to see another miserable day at the office, so the drama becomes a test of how far they’re willing to go to get on the sales board and at what cost to their soul. They’re all of a similar species, one with its own rapacious language and culture, but in this story of survival of the fittest, the strength and weaknesses in their temperaments tell the story. The pungent rhythms of Mamet’s dialogue, with their clipped sentences and bursts of profanity, give Glengarry Glen Ross its unmistakable verve, but it’s remarkable how carefully he delineates these characters.
Meanwhile, the combustible Dave Moss (Ed Harris) and the meek George Aaron (Alan Arkin) drown their sorrows in a bar that resembles Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, where Dave pitches the idea of a robbery to get the leads and sell them to a competitor. Shelley prefers the hard sell, affected with a folksy cadence that’s starting to slip into naked desperation. Ricky Roma (Al Pacino) and Shelley “The Machine” Levene (Jack Lemmon) are a study in contrasts: Ricky holds court in the Chinese restaurant and bar across from the office, where he likes to philosophize with clients like James Lingk (Jonathan Pryce) before circling around, almost imperceptibly, to a sale. He also has possession of leads to precious new clients, which are dangled in front of them as they limp out on “sits” with warmed-over deadbeats and people who just like to talk to salesmen.Īn office robbery makes suspects of them all, but before the leads, some of the contracts and the phones are boosted, Mamet takes time to sketch out the characters over a rainy, fateful evening in Chicago. His purpose is to call attention to the month’s sales contest, where first prize is a Cadillac, second prize is a set of steak knives and third prize is the unemployment line. Down.”) and the large shove that sends its four salesmen careening downhill. The motivational speaker, played by Alec Baldwin, was added for the film version and now seems an indispensable part of the drama, both as a source of its most quotable lines (“Put.
Even in a system of unending exploitation, the way they’re treated – and the way they treat one another – still matters. Mamet’s 1987 debut feature, House of Games, was about the art of the con, and here it takes a lot of smoke and mirrors to turn clients into suckers, selling them on a sinkhole that looks like paradise. Mamet could have turned them all into antagonists, but he has too keen an appreciation for their circumstances and even a little admiration for their craft. Glengarry Glen Ross is about many things – masculinity, morality, capitalism – but it’s fundamentally an “honor among thieves” story, following anguished men as they struggle to hang on to their integrity while acting as low-level rip-off artists.
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