Al Pacino as Ricky Roma. Image via Fios.
The movie adaptation of David Mamet’s play ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’ always caught my eye. For one, it has a sweeping cast of first-rate actors: Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Alan Arkin, Alec Baldwin, Kevin Spacey, and Ed Harris. There’s something majestic about watching actors explore their parts through long dialogue scenes. It is also a sui generis film—It is a filmed play, so it doesn’t feel normal, but it still works cinematically. This achievement, I’ve come to learn, is from the handling of director James Foley and his team. The use of the dolly, purposeful set design, the sounds of rain and trains, and music all create an immersive milieu for the film. The film plays like a play. It draws you in as the curtain rises and holds you until they close. Yet it is still cinema.
Under these involving techniques of cinematic artifice, snappy playwright dialogue, and world-building, I always found something wholly human about the story and the struggle of the characters. Viewing the film in 2013, I was working in a job that involved sales and monthly numbers. As anyone who has worked in such field can surely attest, your feeling of self-worth can sometimes have a converse relationship with your numbers. My first real, post-college job, many of my illusions of full-time professional life were stripped away.
In the film and the play, there is a range of characters with various levels of sales success and kinds of personality. The smooth Ricky Roma is leading the board, closing sales with charm. George Aronow and Dave Moss have two very different personalities—the former timid and the latter hot-headed—but are still both struggling to make sales. John Williamson, the “company man” as Roma scoffs, tries to run a respectable office in this dog-eat-dog environment. The saddest is Shelly “The Machine” Levene, a once-star salesman who is now struggling, quite desperately, to stay in the game. And there is of course Blake from downtown—a character added for the film version—with his suit and expensive watch, telling the characters to “always be closing.”
Image via the Hollywood Reporter.
Recently, I read the play as a stand-alone text. As I read, I couldn’t help but see Pacino, Moss, and others delivering the lines. The play, however, is much simpler than the film. There are fewer scenes and only two locations—the restaurant and the office. It wholly works, and the play hits you with the wit and action of these salesman, and gives a literal emphasis with italics to the longings and motivations of the characters.
After I finished reading the play, I rewatched the film (the first time in a few years) with the play in my hands. The playwright David Mamet wrote the screenplay. It was fun to see the rearrangement of dialogue—I’d be watching, unable to find the said lines in the play, and then suddenly the characters start delivering 3-4 pages of the play. Mamet artfully approached his screenplay as just that, and both final products, as standalone works, work best in their respective mediums. These slight shifts are the craft of writing at its finest. Mamet’s screenplays adds an appropriate dose of cinema and narrative to his original, while keeping the best dialogue from the play. The italicized emphasis, delivered by flesh and blood screen actors, adds another layer of meaning and depth.
In its art, both the play and film of ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’—whether in the 80s as the former, the 90s as the latter, or for someone watching today—capture the complex human emotions that arise from a sales environment. The audience is left with the effect of characters, both entertaining and concerning.
- JG