Robert Altman’s brilliant 1992 return to form The Player gets all the ink when it
comes to Hollywood satire. It is a fantastic piece of work – suspenseful and
darkly comic. But re-watching State and
Main, David Mamet’s comedy about a Hollywood production that tears apart a
small New England town, I realized this has to be ranked as one of the great
satirical films. What makes it more remarkable is that Mamet was primarily
known for his thrillers, set up as complex confidence games. Although it was
not nearly as much a departure as his 1999 film The Winslow Boy, a G-rated period piece family drama about a boy
accused of theft at his school. State and
Main is as biting and funny as his great screenplay for Wag the Dog, a satire of the political
process.
