Stream On! ‘Heist,’ another Gene Hackman master class
A lesser-known Gene Hackman success, courtesy of writer David Mamet.
On March 6, I wrote about Gene Hackman’s great performance in Scorsese’s The Conversation. Hackman didn’t take a lot of leading-man roles. He wasn’t movie-star handsome; but he uncannily became every character he played, including master thief Joe Moore, in David Mamet’s Heist.
/Streaming /Amazon /🍅67% 🍿59% /Trailer /2001 /R
“Everybody needs money, that’s why they call it money!” (Mickey Bergman)
Joe Moore was blown—and he needs to get scarce.
Playwright David Mamet (the Ronin screenplay) wrote and directed Heist. He’s known as a master of hard-boiled dialogue and male bonding. Heist indeed has great quotes (“She could talk her way out of a sunburn”) … and a certain amount of male bonding.
Heist opens with a stylized, apparently successful, jewel-store heist: Joe Moore’s team gets the swag and absconds—but Joe is seen by several security cameras. The initial heist is choreographed like a smoother version of the complicated operations in The Killing and Heat. The team is introduced to us separately: Joe, Joe’s wife Fran (Rebecca Pidgeon), Bobby Blane (Delroy Lindo, Malcolm X), and “Pinky” Pincus (Ricky Jay, Deadwood), who, like drops of mercury, gather inside the store from different directions, ready to rock, with plastic masks. Except for Joe, who forgets to don his and finds himself staring down several security cameras. Hence his need to get scarce—to retire. He plans to disappear on his sailboat with Fran.
This does not sit well with Joe’s sleazy fence, Mickey Bergman (Danny DeVito, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia). Having accrued significant expenses setting up another robbery, Bergman decides to withhold the payment of the jewelry heist from Joe and his crew, so that they need to go through with the next job—robbing a freight airplane carrying a large shipment of gold. Bergman further insists that his nephew, Jimmy Silk, (Sam Rockwell, The Assassination of Jesse James) be a part of the crew. Joe accepts, but shifting loyalties change the complexity of their task, including Jimmy's growing interest in Fran, along with Bergman and Jimmy's belief that Joe’s skills are declining.
The twists and turns that the plot takes, and the double- and triple-crosses, are what we expect from Mamet and he doesn’t disappoint. Like any good “heist” tale, the characters are all competent, for a baseline. Some are smarter, some merely competent—with flaws both minor and major. (They are, however, all wise-crackers!)
Joe and his gang, who worry that Jimmy Silk will double-cross them, employ a series of ruses to convince him that they’ve all “been blown,” that the heist is impossible going forward, and he seems to agree—until he doesn’t. The heist goes on, with Jimmy, and Joe plays along. (He really needs that money for his ultimate getaway!)
The thing about Heist (and many Mamet stories) is that it’s about people lying to one another. So it’s a gamble to figure just how much and when they’re lying. Many a time in Mamet we figure a thing will go a certain way, when it’s a matter of pure chance. We just didn’t see it coming, in the best way possible!
Sources include Wikipedia (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License);
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