Our Flick of the Week is David Mamet’s “The Spanish Prisoner,” a truly tricky tale of intrigue that sets itself apart from the many double-cross movie stories we’ve been getting lately because it has more than trickery as its goal. Indeed, writer-director Mamet seems much more interested in fashioning a world in which everyone is on the make or properly nervous about being exploited.
The film takes its name from what we are told is an age-old con game in which a person is approached by a stranger and told a sad tale about how both the con man’s beautiful relative and the family fortune are being held hostage in a foreign country. If the mark can only come up with some money for a bribe, he could share in any recovered family funds and, possibly, meet the beautiful relative as well.
With that as background — and bravo to Mamet for laying out the con to us and then complicating it — we encounter a set of uptight business people having a conference in the Caribbean. Campbell Scott plays an inventor who fears that rather than getting a proper share of the profits from his latest brainstorm he will be exploited by his boss (Ben Gazzara).
While Scott is walking on the beach, he quite innocently takes a photograph that gets him into trouble. It involves a mysterious man (Steve Martin), who freaks out and will end up offering a lot of money to buy the camera and presumably destroy the photograph. Mamet’s precise way with dialogue is the engine that drives this story, an example of not a whodunit or even a whodunwhat but rather a whydoit or a whybother. Mamet’s answer seems to be that a con game is simply a sincere, hostile response to human frailty. PG. (star) (star) (star) 1/2
– SLIDING DOORS. Gwyneth Paltrow plays a young woman whom we follow through two alternative futures that are triggered by her making or not making it inside the closing, sliding doors of a subway train. In one future she meets an attractive guy; in the other she gets mugged. The switchbacks between the alternative lives become tiresome, and the only reason to watch is Paltrow’s effervescence. PG-13. (star) (star) 1/2
More Top Picks Frisbees
– TWO GIRLS AND A GUY. Robert Downey Jr., an underrated acting talent, turns in another superior performance, here as a randy, two-timing guy who is undone when two of his current flames meet and decide to confront him. The film was written out of the fantasies of writer-director James Toback, who has been ridiculed in the press as a desperate pickup artist himself. The drama works because you feel that the Downey character is genuinely at risk. R. (star) (star) (star)
– = New this week