“Redbelt” for Fans of Literate, Elliptical Mystery

Sunday I made it out to the first new release I’ve seen in some time. David Mamet’s “Redbelt” opened May 2 in only six theatres to huge business (apparently six theatres with a devoted arthouse patronage). Last weekend it expanded to 1,379 theatres (still just a modest wide release compared with the 3,000 and more screens glutted by opening weekends of Hollywood blockbusters), taking in over a million dollars. However its opening $10,000 average per-screen gross immediately dropped to only $826, a paltry eight percent.

Figures like these illustrate the problem with marketing movies to the audiences that want to see them. “Redbelt” appears from its poster and promotion to be a martial arts action picture aimed at male viewers who like seeing guys beat each other up and don’t really want to think much, or possibly at general audiences (despite the R rating) who might be looking for another “Karate Kid.” On the other hand, viewers who recognize the name of writer-director David Mamet (“House of Games,” “Glengarry Glen Ross”) may have a better idea of the type of film it actually turns out to be.

In “Redbelt,” Mamet once again explores the world of seedy, unpredictable characters, most of whom are out to set up one or more of the others in some elaborately contrived money-making scheme. This time it is in the world of jiu-jitsu, contrasting the art and discipline of the self-defense method with its exploitation as a professional spectator sport and means to make money.

Mike Terry, played brilliantly by Chiwetel Ejiofor, is an unswervingly honest jiu-jitsu instructor whose innate sense of decency and personal honor may soon become his downfall. With his friend and favorite student, police officer Joe Ryan (Max Martini) and beautiful Brazilian wife Sondra (Alice Braga), he gradually and unwittingly becomes more and more deeply entangled in an intricate plot of crime, corruption, and betrayal after coming to the aid of a Hollywood actor in a bar fight (Tim Allen in an atypical dramatic role).

Terry is the most deeply developed character, a true movie hero, in Mamet’s sometimes intense morality play. Most of the other characters remain enigmas, just as most people are in real life. We see glimpses of how they act among different groups of people, but Mamet refuses to spell things out for the viewer the way typical Hollywood dramas are expected to do. What he does implicitly throughout the film, is show an admirable person choosing to do what he knows is right amidst intense pressure to “sell out” and take an easier way, even when it can result in personal pain and tragedy. He also implies that the world of professional sports is generally a corrupt entertainment industry out to profit from a twisted perversion of true sporting values that few can afford to maintain.

Not surprisingly, public reaction seems to either love or hate the film, depending upon viewer expectations, with those who like it the best the least likely to attend a marital arts action film unless they happen to see Mamet’s name attached and know his previous work. “Redbelt” takes a while to develop, and many of the elements set up in the beginning are never completely followed through or fully explained. About halfway into it, characters and motivations start to be revealed as something other than originally implied, and the plot becomes more and more complicated until the satisfying yet still somewhat ambiguous conclusion. As usual for a Mamet film, Joe Mantegna shows up in a key role.

“Redbelt” is a martial arts movie for people not particularly interested in typical martial arts movies, and should also appeal to those actually involved in serious martial arts training. It will probably confuse, annoy, or completely turn off people who merely want to see spectacular stunts and fighting without needing much plot to motivate it.

Interestingly all four films I watched over the weekend, although drastically different in genres and styles, had the same theme of one character struggling to maintain self-honor by doing what was best for others, instead of thinking only of him or herself.

Other Films

Friday night I took in the big-budget special effects adventure-fantasy, “10,000 B.C.,” a leisurely paced but reasonably entertaining saga of a prehistoric mammoth-hunting tribe. Its leading hunter wants to track down the marauders who kidnapped his girlfriend and other tribe members, and somehow manages to wind up freeing slaves in Egypt (showing the pyramids under construction a good 6,000 years or more before the fact, among other freely imagined anachronisms).

Saturday I saw George Clooney’s, “Leatherheads,” a pleasant and hopeful attempt to revive 1930s screwball comedy in a 1920s setting. Director/star Clooney gives us a comic dramatization of the birth of professional football out of an essentially free-for-all amateur game more akin to professional wrestling, combined with a look at America’s desire for idealized heroes (compare, for example, Peter Bogdanovich’s “Nickelodeon” and John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence”). Renée Zellweger has the plum role of a wisecracking reporter (trying her best to channel Barbara Stanwyck, Rosalind Russell, and Glenda Farrell), debating whether to uncover a football hero’s past.

Right after that, I finally saw Rob Reiner’s “The Bucket List,” an often mawkishly sentimental but nevertheless genuinely moving serio-comic reflection on the meaning of life, with Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson as two complete strangers who form an unlikely friendship while they are both being treated for terminal cancer. Each wants to achieve certain goals in his last year of life, the most important of which, they discover, is making a positive difference in someone else’s life.

Producing, Shooting, and Editing Course

This week also marked the screenwriting session of UND’s adult moviemaking workshop. There is still time to enroll in next week’s five-evening course in producing, shooting, and editing (6-10 pm at Merrifield Hall on the UND campus) by going on line to http://www.english.und.edu/moviemaking.htm and downloading the necessary forms.