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Spartan

a review by Jeffrey Overstreet

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Doing the right thing can be tough. Sometimes, acting out of duty, virtue, and selfless love leads to all kinds of unintended and unpleasant consequences. The righteous man doing good deeds may find out that he’s up against far more opposition than he ever suspected.

The hero of Spartan, an expert in covert operations for the U.S. government, sets out to do one good thing—rescue a girl. But as he carefully plans his endeavor, he’s unjustly persecuted for following his convictions and doing what he was born to do. Those he should be able to trust end up abusing his admirable efforts and manipulating his talents for their own selfish purposes.

Robert Scott (Val Kilmer) is trying to find the President’s daughter, who has gone missing. The Secret Service has screwed up. Military intelligence is looking less than intelligent in the face of the scandal. Kilmer picks up the trail, and the farther he goes down the rabbit hole, the more he suspects that he will come out under the hot sun in the Middle East, in a foreign country where all the rules of combat are different and far more dangerous.

Sure enough, Scott ends up playing a far more complicated game than he expected. His enemies prove resourceful and formidable. His colleagues have different intentions than he thought. And by the end, even his superiors seem to be against him. Like the guy who blew the whistle on Big Tobacco in The Insider, Scott may lose everything he holds dear by the time he achieves his simple goal … if he achieves it at all. It seems increasingly likely, as the film goes on, that he may fail, and in the process of failing, become a man without a country.

This is going to be one of those film reviews that tells you very little about the story because, well, one of the chief pleasures of Spartan is the way it keeps changing and confounding your expectations.

The other highlight is the dialogue, served up by one of the masters of clever banter, David Mamet. Nobody on Planet Earth speaks with such quick wit and cleverness as Mamet’s characters, but we don’t care because it makes the conversations in the film livelier than in any other films. (I don’t imagine that people in Shakespeare’s day spoke with the eloquence that he gave his characters, but we love his work anyway.)

Spartan’s screenplay is not a masterpiece on par with Mamet’s Glengarry Glenn Ross, but it holds its own alongside some of his other memorable scripts—Homicide, Heist and The Spanish Prisoner. The film does, however, mark Mamet’s career-high as a director. If I hadn’t read the press notes before attending the screening, I would have guessed this was a film by Michael Mann (Heat, The Insider). It’s a muscular, hard-hitting film about tough guys versus tough guys (and one particularly tough gal as well, played by Tia Texada.) The only thing tougher than their muscles are their minds, and the only things sharper than that are their tongues.

In fact, Spartan should become a staple of film writing courses for years to come. There’s not an ounce of fat in this script. It’s the definition of efficient storytelling. Every single line adds something to the picture. If a line is repeated—and in classic Mamet fashion, many lines are frequently repeated—it is repeated for a reason, to add a different emphasis or to reveal a different meaning. As Roger Ebert says, Mamet assumes that his characters “know who they are and what they’re doing, and do not need to explain this to us in thriller-talk.”

In one of the film’s many applause-worthy exchanges, while Scott is teaching the virtuous young soldier Curtis (Derek Luke of Antwone Fisher) how to work undercover in the city, he gives him a tip on how to discern if he is being followed on the street. Scott says, “In the city, it’s always a reflection. In the woods, it’s a sound.”

“And what if you’re in the desert?” Curtis asks.

Scott replies immediately and forcefully: “You don’t want to go to the desert.”

It’s a chilling moment, and true to the core. In fact, the rest of the film plays out to demonstrate that, indeed, you don’t want to go to the desert … especially not if you’re a Westerner trying to carry out justice the old fashioned way.

And thus, of course, the film becomes a spy thriller specifically for 2004—a story about what happens when a virtuous man steps into the ethical complexities and deeply corrupt political landscape of the 21st century. There are jabs thrown that are clearly meant to criticize the administration of Bush the Younger … some of them well-deserved. But Mamet is not so naïve as to simply target the President or to oversimplify the problem of West/East relations. In fact, he goes out of his way to emphasize that the Commander-in-Chief is not to be blamed for the present mess in which we find ourselves. He underlines the problem of the leader having “handlers” who only give him part of the truth, serving their own interests by giving him details that will cause him to act in the way they would prefer.

This dusty, greasy sort of spy action is much more compelling than the high-tech gloss of Tony Scott’s Spy Game or Enemy of the State—it remains focused on the cause, not on the costume; the mission, not the machinery.

Val Kilmer plays this beleaguered, doomed hero with charisma, confidence, and a poker face. Some have criticized the way he handles Mamet-talk, but I find his casual approach appealing. The language could have sounded merely cocky and cool, but Kilmer makes these lines sound like the thoughtful dialogue of a meditative professional. It’s the actor’s best performance since his ultra-cool turn in Heat.

Kilmer is aided by a supporting cast of professionals, some of whom come as delightful surprises, so I won’t name them all here. It will come as no surprise, however, that William H. Macy serves an important purpose—Macy is a veteran of Mamet films, and plays against type here very effectively. But the highest honors go to Derek Luke, most recently seen in Pieces of April. Luke’s talent for creating sincere, admirable, hard-working heroes is evident once again. I hope Luke continues to win opportunities with talented directors. He’s one of the few actors I know who can play a compellingly virtuous hero without seeming heavy-handed or contrived.

In spite of the cast, the direction, and the dialogue, the film falters in the same way most Mamet films do. Mamet makes many unpredictable turns, and in some of those turns, he sprains his ankles. This time, his credibility is hurt, this time, most severely when a female Secret Service agent reveals a preposterous secret about herself … one of those secrets that’s just too convenient and coincidental. There are also a few events that take place at unlikely times.

But this is not a movie about plot. It’s about ethical decision-making patriotism in a time when the integrity of U.S. operations have been called into question. The intentions of world leaders seem simple on TV, but when you read the fine print you find all sorts of duplicity, cover-ups and concealed motives. The journey of the principled patriot may well cost him everything … and he may never see the fruit of his labors.

For a storyteller who seems to have no vision of God’s involvement in history, Mamet may be leading his viewers to cynicism and despair. But for those of us who believe there’s justice waiting beyond this life, we can admire and applaud a hero who does what is right even if it costs him everything. It just leaves us wishing we could give him some words of comfort as he watches his world crumbling around him.

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Writer, director – David Mamet
Director of photography – Juan Ruiz-Anchia
Editor – Barbara Tulliver
Music – Mark Isham
Production designer – Gemma Jackson
Producers – Art Linson, Moshe Diamant, Elie Samaha and David Bergstein

Warner Brothers Pictures. 110 minutes. This film is rated R.

STARRING: Val Kilmer (Robert Scott), Derek Luke (Curtis), William H. Macy (Stoddard), Ed O’Neill (Burch), Kristen Bell (Laura Newton) and Tia Texada (Jackie).

Tags: Review Archive - S

This entry was posted on Friday, May 2nd, 2008 at 11:44 am and is filed under Film Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.