MORTAL COMBAT
by Chris Knipp

If you know your David Mamet well, you can watch Redbelt for the significant ways it's un-Mamet-like and it will be more enjoyable. If you don't know your Mamet, you may find it just as baffling and off-putting as Heist, Spartan, The Spanish Prisoner, etc., because its plot still moves forward through a series of surprising and potentially alienating twists.

Though Mamet's famously mannered dialogue really works better on the stage, the greater issue remains the story. Those twists are harder to take in the realistic-looking context of a movie. They make for a cinema that's enjoyable in a head-trip kind of way but uninvolving. That's still partly true again this time. As David Edelstein says in his nonetheless favorable review of Redbelt, its plot is "so bizarrely convoluted it barely holds together on a narrative level." Maybe Edelstein's right that this is typical of fight movies. Genre elements are still definitely there.You can see Redbelt, for a while anyway, as a grownup Karate Kid, with Chiwetel Ejiofor the Mr. Miyagi and a cop named Joey his Daniel-san. But the convolution is more typical of Mamet than of any genre sources. His double-crosses, often involving Hollywood people and crooked promoters (and that's particularly true here) are more rapid-fire and intricate in Mamet than in B-picture equivalents.

But after the cold blur of Mamet's 2004 Spartan, Redbelt seems a markedly fresher and stronger piece of work. Some call it a "return to form"--again a simplification, since it's such a departure. Some have in fact attributed the improvement to change of form--to Mamet's doing noir this time, or a prize fight story, or even a Rocky with "mixed martial arts" (jujitsu really) the updated replacement of boxing--this time supposedly not even getting in the way of the new (to Mamet) genre. What is the genre, actually? It's pretty mixed.

Critics have drawn opposing conclusions from the new genre. Either the dip into old fashioned meaty B-picture structures makes Redbelt a winner because it's more forceful and accessible than Mamet's usual hide-and-seek bluffs. Or the Mamet ornate mannerisms are absurd in an otherwise conventional action setting and it's a flop.

It's not a flop, and those who complain the fights aren't specific enough are surely missing how well the passive, defensive methods of jujitsu are defined and illustrated in the film early on so they can be appreciated later. The skeleton of the fight story trajectory is unquestionably there, but with typically clever differences slipped in. The movie (apparently) ends with a big staged public competition surrounded by the paraphernalia of audience and promotion and suspense about outcome. Like an old-style boxing flick the movie refers to gambling, fixed fights, payoffs, prizes. But first of all this isn't about boxing--"Boxing's dead," one of the promoters says--and Mamet even takes a lot of personal pleasure in working with this different sport, using his own knowledge from five years of training in it.

Actually the important difference is Mamet's departure, not from
previous genres or their conventions, but from his usual cynicism, which makes the ending far less routine and mechanical than Spartan's, less cold and clever than any of his previous endings were. The source of this difference is in the fundamental nature of the new sport Mamet has grafted onto the form; the hero's dedication to it significantly changes the tone of the proceedings and the way they end. Unlike just any conventional athlete, Mike Terry (Ejiofor) practices and teaches a Brazilian form of jujitsu--his wife Sondra (Alice Braga) is Brazilian--and therefore follows the Bushido code. This is not only not boxing. It's a philosophy, and as we know, its focus is not winning a staged contest but triumphing over any enemy in a conflict. Redbelt is a martial arts movie with a hero who succeeds to the end in staying outside the system. Mike never intends to and does not participate in a promoted public fight (though Mamet just barely dodges that--with his usual slickness about plot).

This is where Mamet completely deviates from his usual world of one cynical double-cross after another. Unlike the underdog, Mike has nothing to prove. His dojo is financially unsuccessful not because he's some kind of hitherto floundering loser but simply because he is--as he must be--indifferent to money. He is in peak condition and never loses, but when he triumphs it's only to make a point, not prove himself. This may link him with Mr. Miyagi. But unlike Miyagi, Mike fights, and defeats, a lot of people on-screen. This is so much an action movie and Ejiofor is so convincing, that the dialogue very rarely sounds mannered this time.

If you understand what Mamet's doing and how that's different from both Mamet's usual routines and the sports genre film, the ending isn't hasty or confused so much as emotionally satisfying and right. If you insist, you can say it's just Rocky for grownups who like Eastern philosophy; but that's something awfully new for this writer/director. As usual for Mamet, Redbelt isn't realistic. But this time he isn't just being clever: the movie leads not to "Ah ha!" but simply a satisfied "Ah!" This time Mamet doesn't give us a manipulated character who does or doesn't survive: he gives us a real hero. This is where the excellent Ejiofor is so essential and so cool. Mike is a character Mamet never conceived before--and a hero more convincing in his iron resiliency than is usual, thanks to the calm intensity and inner peace the actor effortlessly projects.

There are plenty of other reasons for being happy with this film. Everyone is unusually good, and those characters who seem cheap and slick are that way because they're from the world of cheap and slick people. Those who come closer to Mike Terry, like his wife, and the initially dodgy woman lawyer (Emily Mortimer), who becomes his partner in conflict, and his black belt, Joe Ryan (Max Martini), are thoroughly warm and convincing.

In Son of Rambow, directed by Garth Jennings, a bully and a shy, imaginative kid at a country English school in the early Eighties team up to remake Stallone's first Rambo movie First Blood. The result is an appealingly casual picture of some of the joys and sorrows of childhood--blood brotherhood, school crushes, coming to terms with your family. Jenning's movie is a little too like the video the kids are shooting: it's pretty rough around the edges makes itself up as it goes along, and hardly has anyplace original to go. Still, there's an understated Englishness about the whole thing that feels comfortable from the first frame and suits the world it depicts.

Well-behaved Will Proudfoot (Bill Milner) belongs to a fatherless family allied with a bossy religious cult called The Brethren. Things are grim at home and he's not allowed to watch TV even in class. His mother (Jessica Stevenson) is taking more and more cues from would-be father figure Joshua (Neil Dudgeon), putting even more pressure on him to conform as news of his cinematic exploits slips out. But early on, Will reveals a highly developed imagination: he covers a textbook with remarkable and endless drawings that look like outsider art.

In his secret world Will's a superhero already, so when tough-talking classroom hellion Lee Carter (Will Poulter) commandeers him to star in his video, he's quite willing to swing out over the river on a vine even though he can't swim. Lee's secret is that though his surroundings seem posh at the house adjoining a rest home his mother's boyfriend owns, Mum is off in Spain all the time and he's left to his own devices with exploitive and coldhearted older brother Lawrence (Ed Westwick), whose oversize video camera Lee is incidentally snitching. Lawrence's constant phone calls to the Continent on one of those even more preposterously outsized early 80s cell phones show he's none to happy about being left alone himself.

Along come some French visiting students including the skinny, stylish Didier (Jules Sitruk), who behaves and dresses like a racy, haughty rock star. Didier is a droll creation, somehow endearing despite being a parody of both French snobbism and schoolboy poseurs. From the moment he steps off the bus in his little red boots grandly announcing his arrival to all of England, he instantly acquires a claque of slavish boy and girl admirers. Winningly, he turns out to be a loner and misfit too, and he eagerly joins in the filmmaking; but then he and his posse spoil things for "Colonel Carter" (Lee).

A distributor paid $8 million for this little film at Sundance, a move the Variety reviewer thought unwise. It probably was, but a film doesn't have to be well or expensively made to earn a following. With its offhandedness and many original little touches, Son of Rambow is to be cherished for its understated charm and will probably be guaranteed many years of happy home viewing. This time Jennings is relaxed and avoids the arch over-elaborateness of his last film, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.One thing I particularly liked was the typically throw-away lines of the classroom teacher, whose rap is low-keyed, sophisticated, unselfconscious and funny in ways one can't imagine an American film achieving. This movie has its extravagant moments but trying too hard is something it never does, though despite its haphazard quality, it ties up its many themes almost too neatly at the end.

©2008 Chris Knipp
CineScene