Spanish Prisoner problematic

Coming to campus this weekend is David Mamet's much acclaimed film The Spanish Prisoner. Taking its title from an old confidence scam, the plot is a wheel within wheels, double-crossed to the point where all truth is doubted. Despite its cleverness, The Spanish Prisoner is a problematic film, always keeping itself at arms length from an audience.

Campbell Scott plays the very boring Joe Ross, who develops "The Process," something which will make the company he works for a great profit. As his boss (Ben Gazzara) continually dances around finalizing Joe's percentage of the profits, Joe becomes nervous that the company will forget about rewarding him.

When seemingly random occurrences bring Joe in contact with a super-rich businessman who befriends and appears to help him, Joe begins to get involved in a situation out of his control. Played with straight-faced charm by Steve Martin, wealthy Jimmy Dell introduces Joe to a world of luxury clubs and Swiss bank accounts far above Joe's meager means.

Throw in an innocent office assistant seeking to date him, and Joe's paranoia begins to take on deeper dimensions. From these anxieties a web of intrigue and mystery develops. Joe finds himself thrust into an FBI sting operation, a war with his company, and eventually a run from the law.

This is not an easy film to summarize, namely because the incoherence of the events at hand propels the plot forward. The nature of these events, whether Joe's acquaintances are innocent and made at random, or whether deeper forces are deliberately moving against him, also confuses issues. The bottom line is, who is conning whom, who is trying to steal Joe's invention, and why?

Mamet finds the situations which these questions raise much more significant than the answers. This isn't to say that he doesn't reveal the mysteries in the end. Like a good Hitchcock film, Mamet pleasantly ties together the movie's many loose threads. This closure, however, doesn't answer the central questions of character motivation which have been raised along the way.

For a movie which alludes that hidden depths are the most dangerous and darkest waters of the human soul, The Spanish Prisoner never gets beyond the surface of its characters. Mamet's language, as always, is witty, measured and blatantly unrealistic in its rhythms and tones. The actors pick up on these rhythms for effects which are at best amusing and, at worst, almost mumbled.

The problem seems to be that The Spanish Prisoner lacks a human interest. The film is all surface, image and plot, with little depth.

Mamet told The Boston Herald that, "to one extent, the movie is a confidence game with the audience," and perhaps Mamet is having the last laugh. The plot, dialogue, acting and film style all move the story along at a clipped, precise and stylized pace with no attempts at portraying a realistic, or interesting, level of human emotion. As Joe's paranoia prevents him from relaxing his guard around anyone, the film's cold non-realism prevents its audience from empathizing with Joe.

Underneath its clever plot twists and tidy exposition, the central conceits of The Spanish Prisoner seem largely banal: people aren't always what they seem. The cold and calculating business world alienates and controls the powerless individual. Greed taken to its extreme leads to unreal levels of fear and anxiety. One need look no further than Melrose Place to find a much more sexy and vitalized explication of the same ideas.

The film becomes a metaphor of the paranoid and distanced nature of communication in a world concerned solely with image. Perhaps in this sense, Mamet's non-realism attempts to present a new form of realism. Yet taken to such an extreme form, characters become only stereotypes, actors seem as lively as automatons, and insights boil down to aphorisms.

As interesting as a good logic puzzle, The Spanish Prisoner comes out too structurally calculated, cold and smart to raise much interest. It dwells so much on surfaces it fails to be a profoundly thoughtful or memorable movie. For moviegoers who like puzzles but prefer a more psychologically complex inquiry into the depths of humanity, there's always Hitchcock.