American Buffalo

Notes from a Business 101 course taught by David Mamet: The two most important principles in any transaction are: (1) Fuck the other guy; and (2) Piss on him after. At least, that's what I imagine Mamet saying, based on his plays. They abound in transactions -- everybody's always selling or buying something -- and whether the commodity is land in Florida, a hit in Hollywood, or ideas in academia, his characters engage in trickery, threats, even outright theft, to come out of a deal on top. In American Buffalo, a junk-shop owner and two friends plan to rob a coin collector who bought a buffalo nickel at the shop for what may have been less than full value. The owner, Don, wants his protégé Bob to nick the coins, but Don's pal Teach sells Don on the idea of letting him do it instead. Each player, who has his own interests in this piece of “business,” is willing in some way to screw someone else to protect them, and Mamet maneuvers them around each other in ways both awful and funny. Buffalo gave Mamet his first success and 20 years later, it hits the screen with its corrosive view of “business” intact and performances that prove that the scheming of small-timers in a Chicago junk shop can still be fascinating. Dustin Hoffman leads the way with an aggressively kinetic performance; his Teach is perpetually on the move: pacing, sitting, standing, gesturing, picking things up, setting them down. He has to have a hand in everything, a piece of everybody's action. It's showy stuff, but Hoffman drives it with a fire of desperation that makes it work and that gives off the smoke of a loser we can smell in every frame. Dennis Franz gives a vivid reading of Don, but subtly, almost wholly through his eyes. In his looks we see all of this man's anger, resentment, and frustration, and the trust he feels for Bob, a seeming naïf that Sean Nelson imbues with a captivating openness. The actors make these characters intriguing, and director Corrente makes the atmosphere so claustrophobic that we see what propels them to their sorry fate. Corrente doesn't always illuminate the nuances in Mamet's text, and his pacing is uneven (the film's climax comes on somewhat abruptly), but in the aftermath of the trio's implosion, he captures in full view the loss in their faces. It eloquently sums up the terrible price of Mamet's basics of business.