State and Main

The staccato dialogues alone are enough to make State and Main recognisable as a work by the master of biting contemporary satire, David Mamet. After the subtle historical drama The Winslow Boy, he serves up a slightly lighter dish in an amusing attack on the mores of the American film industry. A film crew arrives in a small town in rural New England. Apart from the upheaval caused by such an event, in the best tradition of the romantic comedy more contacts develop between the crew and the locals than is intended. For instance, the star of the film (Alec Baldwin) can’t keep his hands off ‘under-aged’ girls. When the shy and infatuated scriptwriter witnesses this, he is in a moral quandary, but his employers want him to keep quiet. The film crew already had to leave one small town after a similar ‘incident’ and the ruthless producer can do without any more delays.Mamet ridicules both Hollywood and some inhabitants of the small town, who would like to cash in on the glamour of Hollywood. Yet Mamet is relatively mild about the way of life in the town. The wonderful cast, with special praise for Philip Seymour Hoffman as the idealist and ambitious scriptwriter, W.H. Macy as the tortured director, Alec Baldwin, and Sarah Jessica Parker as the puffed up starlet who refuses to do the nude scene, obviously relish mocking their own image.