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‘Henry Johnson’ Review: David Mamet Stays in His Rabbit Hole of Cryptic Power Games, but Shia LaBeouf Makes a Striking Convict
Shia LaBeouf makes a striking convict, as David Mamet tries to take us out of our comfort zone. But he has created an overly rarefied discomfort zone.
David Mamet has been a celebrated playwright for half a century, and there are so many themes and obsessions and modes and rhythms and tics running through his work that it’s easy to survey it all and simply categorize it as “Mametesque.” The continuity is there. In the plays that put him on the map, like “American Buffalo” and “Sexual Perversity in Chicago,” he was trying to approximate the ways ordinary people talk, which is why the words came out in a jagged profane half-articulate sputter, the characters stepping on each other’s percussive thoughts. It all culminated in Mamet’s 1983 masterpiece, “Glengarry Glen Ross,” a timeless celebration/indictment of small-time con-artist salesmen that turned the deceptive language of hustlers into crookback poetry.
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