Glengarry
2017
Movies change for you over time. “Altered States” was at one point of time the most amazing movie I could imagine. “Wings of Desire” stuck with me for years. “Barton Fink” as well.
“Glengarry Glen Ross” has not yet lost its appeal.
https://youtu.be/qa9dttNx1S8
Al Pacino’s monologues are the real focus of Mamet’s script. This one initially seems directed at no one in particular. An intriguing aside - “all train compartments smell vaguely of shit, it gets so you don’t mind it…” He is seated alone at a booth in the Chinese restaurant next to the office. A style of Chinese restaurant you don’t see anymore. I remember a similar one growing up - next to the lawfirm where my dad was a young lawyer. A deeply red place with deep soft booths and a full bar. Jazz or soft vocal pop music. Vending machines where you pull a long lever to release cigarette packs or gum…
The observation is expertly lobbed to the next booth where Jonathan Pryce’s character, “James Link” sits alone. At first he reacts as if he has overheard a conversation and then with an abashed self-awareness realizes it is meant for him. A great opening to a scene which is one of my very favorite.
Its hard to say what is going on here. On one hand a sales pitch showing Roma’s skill in front of the less successful salesmen grumbling at the bar. At moments it feels almost like a seduction. Link is deeply introspective and Roma senses a need for connection. At the same time he is practiced and does not push too hard. This is why he doesn’t sit at the same booth. Why the admissions and confessions, the relativism:
'There's an absolute morality? You want to believe that, so-be-it... Hell exists on earth? Yes. But I wont live in it...'
This inversion of Pascal’s ‘wager’ sounds like stream of consciousness but is carefully honed. Very quickly it turns from a sales pitch to something deeper.
The personal introductions comes about 3 minutes into the scene - Roma discusses sex, morality and religion before they even even exchange names. Link barely speaks at all. Roma slips in ideas in the 3rd person and follows up with using a conditional tone and a confessional first person. He swings so smoothly between these voices that Link has sold his soul before the mention of property even comes up.
In the movie (unlike the play) Pacino’s Roma subtly has Link join him in his booth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ru7ytSQdH_k
In Goethe’s Faust (http://www.bartleby.com/19/1/3.html) when Mephistopheles stands at the Doctor’s doorstep, effectively trapped. He can’t pass over until the shape on the floor in the doorway (the pentagram or ‘wizard’s foot’) is changed.
I must confess, my stepping o’er
Thy threshold a slight hindrance doth impede;
The wizard-foot doth me retain.
Something subtle happens the proper shape is drawn across the threshold and Mephistopheles can enter, so Faust bids Mephistopheles enter but it is still not he must ask three times: “Thrice be the words express’d.”
And Mephistopheles is in the driver’s seat.
“All train compartments smell vaguely of shit” sets the tone. The booths in musty restaurants have a similar odor of alcohol, sweat and desperation. A moment of feeling trapped in both the monotony of a train and the contingency of animal bodies. It does not take much to strip a man down to nothing, trapped in soft booth, gimlet in hand, “April in Paris” on the sound system, speaking to the devil…