A "caper thriller," if we must classify it, about a team of con artists and the female psychologist (and best-selling author of Driven: Obsession and Compulsion in Everyday Life) who becomes involved in their schemes as scientific observer and then as participant. Stiff, sterile, strange and unreal, suppositional in logic and shaky in construction -- it might even better have been titled House of Cards. As much because of all that as despite it, it's a good deal of fun. The directorial debut of playwright David Mamet, who also wrote the script, is marked by deliberate, one-thing-at-a-time pacing and simple, mounted-butterfly compositions: meticulous, minimalist, precise bordering on prissy (anal-retentive, Doctor, would you concur?). His dialogue has the severest case of echolalia this side of Harold Pinter ("I want something from you." "What do you want?" "I want you to do me a favor." "Why should I do you a favor?" etc.). The artiness and aridness of this style are extreme enough to kill off some of the fun and not quite extreme enough to create any unintended fun of their own. The fair share of fun that remains in between is the consequence of a thoroughgoing artificiality, an aesthetic gamesmanship as near (under the skin) to Congreve and Oscar Wilde as to closer look-alikes like John D. MacDonald and George V. Higgins. And Joe Mantegna, as the heroine's guide into the lower depths (her own as well as her society's), virtually carries the movie on his shoulders -- and very relaxed shoulders, they are -- in a performance poised at just about the midpoint between Mephistopheles and the archetypal Latin Lover, retaining the hypnotic power of each while avoiding their hammier excesses, and held down to earth by a body and face more suggestive of the Greater Jersey City Chevrolet Salesman of the Month. With Lindsay Crouse. (1987) — Duncan Shepherd
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