I just saw State and Main.
What a painful plodding piece of sewage that was. Goddamn.
The acting was incredibly bad,the writing was painfully trite and full of bizarre cliches from Mamet’s diseased version of a rural Vermont that cannot possibly exist.
Plus it has Rebecca Pidgeon doing a reprise of her role in The Spanish Prisoner, a movie in which her performance wasn’t nearly as painful
but also made me want to find her and pull her head off with construction equipment.
Also, Mamet should be ashamed of his slipshod work as a director,
because there are crazy problems with basic elements in a number of scenes.
Example: The judge at the end puts on a silly golf cap and says he is going to play golf. They are indoors, so presumably he is on his way to a nearby course. Except, while he says this, he grabs a club out of a bag someone is carrying for him. This is a small town and the judge has someone carrying his clubs on the way to the course. And he is apparently going to walk/drive there holding this one driver while someone else carries the rest of the clubs. What the fuck? Could Mamet never have met someone who plays golf?! He’s a director/screenwriter! There is no possible way!
Another example: A major plot point concerns itself with a fancy dinner at the mayor’s house. William H Macy‘s character writes it down on the production whiteboard, in red ink, on Tuesday the 12th, to be precise. In a wacky zany misunderstanding, a Production Assistant accidentally wipes it off… and then rewrites it in the wrong place (in green), causing them to miss the dinner and thus insult the mayor…
Or rather, that is what would have happened if the director was paying attention to his own script. Because what we see actually happens is the PA writes it back in the proper place, Tuesday the 12th. Later we see it is somehow rewritten on Wednesday the 13th, with the 12th having a smudge of the original red ink message on it. Except in the previous shot we also saw her wipe the board clean of red ink. This is just lame- the director WROTE THE SCRIPT. How could he miss something like this? And then could they have reshot a closeup of a whiteboard, with someone writing the appointment in the proper (wrong) place?Okay one more- they are shooting in Vermont. They were previously in New Hampshire. At one point they ship the star’s weights there because he needs to work out. Vermont is not that big. Vermont isn’t like California, where it will take you all day to even get to the border of the next state, and another half day to get to a city in that state. Look at a map: nowhere in Vermont is so isolated you cannot drive to a larger city and buy something and drive back. They could have driven to the old set and picked up whatever, or bought anything they needed in a nearby city. If you had to drive to Boston (which is in Massachusetts, genius) and back, it wouldn’t even take all day. Maybe you could even drive to New York City, or to Philadelphia, all of which are giant cities.
These errors are just careless.
I guess it says something that the only character I could stand in this movie was the entertainment lawyer, “Marty,” since he’s the only person to be taken seriously on the production.