Spartan
Directed by David Mamet

Ever since his 1987 directorial debut House of Games, David Mamet has characterized himself as a humble cinematic apprentice–a playwright and screenwriter still trying to puzzle his way through the whole filmmaking thing. No wonder his directorial efforts–including Homicide, Oleanna, The Winslow Boy, The Spanish Prisoner, Heist and Spartan, a military thriller that opened Friday–are damned with faint praise. It’s true that Mamet started out as a mere director–throughout the 90s, in this newspaper and elsewhere, I said as much. But to borrow the title of another Mamet film, Things Change.

Despite too-familiar character types and some structural flaws, Mamet’s recent films, State and Main and Heist, were clearly the work of a filmmaker. The former had a jaunty snap, like Preston Sturges on mean pills, and the latter had a funky/nasty edge reminiscent of Steven Soderbergh in Out of Sight mode. Spartan, which stars Val Kilmer as a commando trying to rescue a high-profile kidnap victim, is Mamet the filmmaker’s greatest leap forward yet. On first glance, it seems an arty stab at blending the hard-edged military fantasy with the conspiracy thriller. But it’s no exercise; it’s a triumph. It deploys imagery with the same confidence, precision and force with which Mamet deploys words and has serious things to say about America’s current mental state besides.

First, I’ll acknowledge Mamet’s sheer command of filmmaking craft. Working in CinemaScope (with cinematographer Juan Ruiz Anchia, a regular collaborator), he fully engages cinema’s ability to put viewers into a subjective state. An opening chase sequence in a forest mixes darting Steadicam work, disorienting crane shots and documentary-style, hair-trigger zooms. Borrowing a behind-the-shoulder, handheld tracking shot perfected in Michael Mann’s The Insider, Mamet forces us to identify with Kilmer’s stoic military man, Robert Scott, as he moves through the film’s key locales. He makes adept use of frames-within-frames, staging important action on the other side of windows and doorways; he even uses the silhouetted outlines of people’s arms, legs and shoulders to constrict or disrupt key moments. This conscious motif of interference/obstruction reinforces the notion that our hero, stoic military officer Robert Scott–well-played by an uncharacteristically minimalist Kilmer–is forever being separated from the Truth.

The movie’s substance is as impressive as its style–though no less playful. Spartan earns comparison with The Parallax View, The Conversation, Robert Altman’s Images and other super-bleak thrillers from the 70s. Those pictures weren’t just suspense contraptions; they were imaginative responses to cultural and political realities, as much "about" real life during the Vietnam era as more direct efforts like Medium Cool and The Graduate. Conceived in the same spirit, Spartan is the first great mythic exploration of 9/11 and its aftermath by a major American filmmaker. (Plot spoilers ahead. See the movie before you read the rest of this column.)

Scott is a former commando now teaching young recruits in the art of tracking, extraction and killing. His pupils include a serious young man named Curtis (Derek Luke), who will become his partner, and Jackie (Tia Texada), a young female soldier whose hunger for a mission is deadly serious. Scott is brought in by the Secret Service to locate a missing Harvard student who is eventually revealed to be the president’s daughter. (Mamet’s reluctance to confirm the obvious is the very best kind of audience flattery.)

In time, it’s revealed that the First Daughter, Laura Newton (played with grit and desperation by Kristen Bell) was last seen at an underground sex club near campus. She’s a wild child (like the Bush girls), but with a provocatively Clintonian twist: Her sexual acting-out at the nightclub was a rebellion against sleazebag dad, who recently visited Boston under the pretense of visiting his daughter but actually came there to get laid, as usual. Scott learns Laura has become the captive of a sex-slave ring bankrolled out of Saudi Arabia. ("All young, all blonde," says a convicted slaver who’s entrapped by the undercover Scott into revealing clues.) The kidnapping was not meant as a political act–the kidnappers didn’t even know who Laura was. But the government still must find Laura as quickly as possible, because when her captors find out who she is, they’ll kill her to protect themselves.

The case is suddenly declared over when the body of a woman fitting Laura’s description is fished out of Boston Harbor. With help from Curtis, Scott gradually discards his Good Soldier mentality, searches for the real truth and finds it in Dubai. His inevitable rescue of Laura from Saudi Arabia is not presented as a happy ending but as one more layer in a government plot. The final images suggest that Scott was manipulated into rescuing Laura off the books, so to speak–and that the whole kidnapping incident will likely be used (and perhaps was allowed to happen) so that administration hawks could push America into war with a certain Middle Eastern nation.

The exact details of the Spartan conspiracy are left vague–as well they should be. Mamet’s movie isn’t a muckraking work of speculation but a dark political fantasy–a suggestive working-out of American terrors. In my reading, Laura symbolizes the trusting public, which is not quite as innocent as it appears. Her philandering, perpetually distracted dad does metaphoric double-duty as Bill Clinton, who has been accused by right-wingers of setting a climate for an attack on U.S. soil by failing to deal with our enemies aggressively, and George W. Bush, a decent but presumably dim and easily manipulated figurehead. Laura’s kidnapping (i.e., 9/11) was either allowed to happen or was a surprise. Either way, it was appropriated by the president’s advisors who then used it to manipulate the president (and the American public) into attacking a Middle Eastern country they could not justify attacking before. The kidnappers embrace ethnic caricature, and an unscrupulous presidential administration (epitomized by William H. Macy’s icy fixer) is happy to use their frightening image to smear other Arabs who have no connection to bad guys other than a shared religion and culture.

There are bound to be alternative interpretations of Spartan, but I suspect they will inhabit a similar geopolitical universe. And I’d bet my house on my conviction that Mamet constructed Spartan to encourage this sort of woolgathering. I seriously doubt he would have made the kidnappers Saudi Arabs, or the conspirators white agents of the U.S. government, if he did not want audiences to connect the film’s plot to the psychic and political upheavals of the past three years. Even the title suggests a global clash between Greco-Roman traditions of culture and war and those of the tribal East. Mamet kids Western delusions of grandeur at the same time that he salutes them–a complex and honest response from a storyteller who never wants audiences to feel just one way. (A scene where Curtis fights another soldier in a training exercise has a wonderful sight gag that mocks and celebrates Western warrior mysticism. As the struggle begins, the camera follows Scott and fellow training officers as they step away from a wall, revealing, sentence by sentence, the following inscription: "These are the precincts of pain… A goddess lives here… Her name is Victory.")

If a young, unknown filmmaker created a genre picture this politically relevant and stylistically assured, critics would be tripping all over themselves to declare him the Next Big Thing. Thus far, Mamet has gotten mostly eye-rolls and head-pats from critics. In an uncharacteristically superficial pan, Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman said that certain aspects of the plot were unbelievable or unnecessarily elaborate–a meaningless complaint that critics never make of genre pictures they enjoy and does not begin to acknowledge the film’s many nuances and provocations. In a more thoughtful but still unsatisfying review, the Times’ A.O. Scott writes off the Arab kidnappers as "either defiantly politically incorrect or hysterically racist" and finds it "unlikely" that Mamet "will ever become a great filmmaker."

I think he already is.