Every week, Shelf Life sees Tom White select and talk about a movie that lives on his DVD shelf, one he thinks we should all see.
There's often times I can't get my head around how movies with such a fantastic pedigree and legacy just get forgotten, and left by the wayside. Let's take the subject of today's article. It stars Al Pacino, Kevin Spacey, Jack Lemmon, Alec Baldwin, Ed Harris, and Alan Arkin (a group of actors immensely popular across a whole range of generations), written by acclaimed playwright David Mamet, was responsible for one of Al Pacino's Oscar nominations (the same year he won for Scent of a Woman), and went onto inspire one of The Simpson's most enduring supporting characters. But when I mention 1990's Glengarry Glen Ross to people, more often than not I'm met with blank stares and exclamations of "Glengarry Glen who?". If I was prone to over-reaction, I would call it a travesty.
Based on Mamet's own play of the same name, Glengarry Glen Ross wears it's stage roots almost like a badge of honour. The claustrophobic nature of the stage is carried over perfectly by director James foley, and works hand in hand with Mamet's wonderful dialogue, which zips back and forth between the impressively fleshed out characters. As the story goes, we follow four real estate salesmen who are given an ultimatum: the top two sellers after one week get to keeps their jobs, the other two will be fired. From the outside, the stakes for these salesmen seem pretty low. I mean, how cut throat can the world of real estate really be? But from the opening scene, we are thrust into their world immediately, getting to know these characters inside and out, which helps the audience get that more invested. This scene, not present in Mamet's original work, also starts the movie on the highest of notes, with Alec Baldwin's trouble shooter Blake setting down the stakes in a flurry of measured fury and obscene language. It shakes up the movie from the off, putting almost everybody involved, both in the cast and the audience, on edge.
Glengarry Glen Ross is very much a character study, and there is a wealth of fleshed out characters here for Foley and Mamet to put under the microscope. With their jobs on the line, which will greatly effect their personal lives, we get to see their true nature come to the fore as they attempt to win the best leads, and thus the competition, in the most under handed and backstabbing ways possible. While Pacino may have gotten the Oscar nomination, it is Jack Lemmon (who went on to get his fair ahre of awards and praise for the role) who owns the show here. His Shelley "The Machine" Levene is at once an utterly fascinating character, once the firms top seller but now in a unshakeable slump, with a chronically ill daughter to take care of. Watching him flip through a huge range of emotions seemingly on a dime is absolutely compelling. His exchanges with his boss, Williamson (Kevin Spacey), are Shelley at his best, charming him, threatening him, and begging for compassion all in one breath. He's a pretty ugly character when all is said on done, a snivelling wretch who will do anything to help himself, but Lemmon imbues him with a quality that you can help but feel for him.
