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[Short Reviews]

LAKEBOAT

Although lately he’s been flirting with G ratings and generic comedy with The Winslow Boy and State and Main, David Mamet hasn’t changed much over the years. His first play, here adapted for the screen by first-time director and Mamet regular Joe Mantegna, crackles with the same machismo, absurdity, elliptical narrative, and obscene, antiphonal dialogue that distinguishes his best work.

College kid Dale Katzman (David’s half-brother Tony Mamet) has taken up a summer job in a place where his studies in English literature won’t cut him much slack — the rusty hulk of a Great Lakes steel freighter. The crew is played by some of the screen’s greatest character actors, and that makes for a loose, episodic series of cracked conversations and devastating monologues dutifully admired by the David Mamet manqué. Fred (Jack Wallace) recalls discovering how to seduce women (you treat them like shit); Joe (Robert Forster) remembers a long night in Gary, Indiana, spent with a revolver. Both tales are hilarious until the bottom drops out into horror.

Providing comic relief is Denis Leary as the begoggled, bewildered Fireman, who fills the time between checking his two gauges by leafing through girlie magazines; but all the laughs are rueful as Mantegna slyly undermines his heroes’ bravado and plumbs their pathos. Lakeboat springs a leak only with its unifying device: Dale is merely callow, his naïveté paralleled to an ongoing series of Rashomon-like flashbacks to the mysterious fate of Guigliani (an unbilled Andy Garcia), the guy he replaced on the crew. Gradually, Dale starts to look like Guigliani, but it seems all he’s learned from a tour on this lakeboat is how to be a showboat.

By Peter Keough

Issue Date: June 28- July 5, 2001