"You say you are Jewish, but you don't speak Hebrew? What are you then?"

At this moment, the character being spoken to truly doesn't know the answer. He probably thought he did only a mere day before.


I first saw this film when it came out in 1991, and I never forgot it. It got a very positive reaction by Siskel & Ebert, and that is how I had heard about it. Then it opened and played for just one week at my local art house. No ads on TV, and no other press reviews that I normally read. It is hard to believe that such a powerful film, written by the even then well known David Mamet, could be released with so little fanfare.

The lead character of this film, played by Joe Mantegna, is Jewish but only begins to really think about what that means when he is asked the question I quote at the top. We learn he is Jewish not through anything he does, but towards the beginning of the film, when a black officer calls him a k-i-k-e. And he doesn't seem to be that angry about the choice of words. Later, we hear him talking on the phone with another officer and he himself even makes anti-Semitic remarks about the people who own the phone he is using.

In the opening of the film we watch a criminal make an escape after wounding multiple FBI Agents in a shoot-out. This black criminal is a major score for the police if they can catch him since the FBI dropped the ball. Officer Bobby Gold, played by Joe Mantegna, is the officer assigned to the case. He and his partner, while rushing to arrest a man who may know the whereabouts of the criminal, they pull over to help another officer in distress. The other officer's partner is trapped by a dog at the scene of a homicide. Wanting to leave before it is too late to find the man they want, Gold is told that he is the first homicide officer at the scene, and this is now his case.

It turns out that this crime involves and elderly woman who was apparently shot by robbers. She owned a candy store in a very rough, black part of town. While investigating the scene he meets the woman's son, who is a doctor, and apparently has some clout with Gold's superiors. He was going to be released from the investigation, since his original case has so much more prestige for the force. However, the son of the murdered woman uses his influence to demand that Gold remain on the case. He mistakenly feels that since Gold is Jewish, that maybe he would care more about the murder than another officer might. Mantegna doesn't want the case, and even tries to tell the son that he isn't the right man for the job. It doesn't work, so he intends to half-heartedly work this case, while really going after his much more notorious prey, whose capture would surely be good for a career boost.

While working the original case, he gets a call to report to the son's home. The son's wife believes that someone tried to shoot at them from the rooftop across from their home. Looking around their home, he can find no sign of a shot, nor can he imagine why anyone would want to shoot at them living quietly in their expensive home. They are having a service for the mother there at the same time, so he makes a phone call from a study to his partner over what he missed while "wasting his time". He tells his partner that these Jews are crazy in thinking that someone must be trying to kill them. He even makes some anti-Jewish remarks. Suddenly he realizes that the son's mid-20ish daughter was in the room with him, and heard everything he said. He had briefly spoken with her earlier at the crime scene, so he knows who she is. He feels horrible, and she feels angry. He immediately apologizes, swearing to find her grandmother's killer, but she'll hear none of it. She doesn't tell her father, or anyone else, about what she had just heard.

I am not Jewish, so maybe I just don't know any better, but it is here that the movie introduced me to a world that I didn't know existed. At the scene of the crime, we see that the woman was shot reaching for an old, but expensive, looking handgun. In her basement, he finds a picture of the woman holding a machine gun, and an invoice slip for twenty other similar machine guns from 1948. It turns out that this woman helped finance Jews during the war that eventually created Israel. It later turns out that these guns were all from a stolen shipment, and a list of names will possibly lead to the owners of these long lost weapons.

Now the Gold character begins to start investigating the mother's murder seriously. Although, I believe that this is more out of curiosity of her past. He does wonder if maybe someone was out to get this woman. On the rooftop where the woman's daughter thought he heard a shot, he found a scrap of paper with the word "Grofas" on it. Another Jewish character sees this paper and tells him that this was a name for Hitler towards the end of the war. He goes to a Jewish library to ask for more details about whom might be using this name today. While there he overhears that a certain address has already requested all of the information on the subject.

Going to that address, he finds what looks like an abandoned building. While wandering around the outside of the building, two people in jogging outfits suddenly pull out guns, and don't seem to care at all that Gold is a cop. While they are searching for him, some people emerge from the abandoned building who he recognizes from the service for the murdered woman. They take him inside where he sees various rooms containing ham radio communication systems, a gun armory, and other signs that make this building look like a fortress.

Early on a Jewish character says, "That's what you think right? That it's all in our mind. Whenever a Jew says someone tried to hurt him, you always say we are paranoid." Looking around at this very wealthy Jewish doctor whose wife thinks someone is shooting at them from a neighboring roof, I was thinking "Well, yeah." I mean who'd want to get this guy, even in the possible context of the movie.

What the movie shows us is that there probably is a large group of people out there who are still trying to punish the Jews. The fortress the character is taken to appears to be a combat post where they fight anti-Semitism. Later in the film we are shown an innocent looking toy hobby store that holds a room in back filled with Anti Jewish pamphlets as well as Nazi propaganda. The Jews blow it up 'to send a message'.

Again I say that I am not Jewish, and have never experienced really either side of this, but the movie convincingly shows me that both these things may exist out there. I was born in 1968, but my parents tell me that if I had been born fifteen years earlier, I would probably still commonly hear racist remarks about Jews.

Mamet's stories tend to be about con games, and so are his scripts. The movie makes you think that it is about one thing, takes us into other directions, and then comes back around to the original story ingeniously. I still cannot decide if the Jewish portion of the film could be considered a subplot to the larger story, or vice-versa. So much seems to happen in this film, that it always surprised me that this seemed to take place in only about a day and a half.

A lesser film may have paralleled the story of the cop finding himself with a crime drama of the cop trying to discover who another person was. Instead there are two police stories here, one will seem somewhat traditional with a mother turning in her son in the hopes he won't be killed, and the cop hoping to catch the high profile killer to help his career. The other is of a woman murdered for reasons unknown, and all he wants to do is find her killer and get on to the next case.

The true conflict in the story is the moral decisions that Gold must deal with. When I said before that he finds his nature, this isn't exactly true. If he feels at all Jewish, it is in a negative way. As if it is something he has to prove he is better than. He fits in well with his fellow officers. This is the group he belongs to. Yet, when offered a chance to be let into the Jewish community, he must first go against his duty as a police officer. This is everything he has been a part of before. The film doesn't give us an easy answer where we see a character with a choice to make, and he makes it. The film gives us twists and turns that truly test the boundaries of his loyalty, and the loyalty of those who offer him a place he can identify with.

If you've ever seen a play, or another film of Mamet's, then you will certainly recognize his dialogue here. It is very distinctive. There is a certain rapid fire delivery, and an overlapping that I cannot quite explain, but it is very recognizable.

This was my first introduction to William H. Macy, and up until "Fargo", I always remembered him from here. I really liked him in this, and made it a point to remember him five years previous to his career establishing work in "Fargo". His cryptic last line of dialogue in this film stuck with me in how it seemed so real. This film was also my first introduction to Ving Rhames, although I didn't know it at the time. He was a fearsome presence, and I feel bad that I didn't recognize him when I next saw him in "Pulp Fiction".

There is some violence at the end which is unlike anything I had seen before. A shot cop is speaking with the man who just shot him. There is a casual conversation between the seriously wounded officer and the fleeing criminal. His other shots into the victim are used almost as punctuation to his statements.

This is an odd film to try and describe. Like most other films that try to exercise the mind, it really cannot be summed up briefly. It succeeds on many levels and in many ways. And it showed me a world I didn't know existed, and what higher compliment can I give a film than that?




Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Good for Groups
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older