Sweating Out Loud

By RICHARD CORLISS

TITLE: GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS

DIRECTOR: JAMES FOLEY

WRITER: DAVID MAMET

THE BOTTOM LINE: The prizewinning comedy of outrage is brought to the screen, intact and enhanced.

WHAT WOULD YOU PAY FOR A dream? Radiant sunshine. A light breeze caressing your newly tanned torso. Glamour, companionship, security, all in one pretty parcel. A place that's yours, you own it, easy installments. A dream called home. What would you pay for a deluxe retirement condo? These guys can get it for you -- wholesale, practically.

Two decades ago, between acting jobs, David Mamet worked in a real estate & office. There, the playwright later recalled, salesmen peddled "tracts of undeveloped land in Arizona and Florida to gullible Chicagoans." It was a chance to observe up close these dinosaurs of capitalism ("An idea," Mamet said, "whose time has come and gone") working their cold-blooded performance art on people too nice to say no. Mamet dramatized the experience in the 1983 play Glengarry Glen Ross, which won a Pulitzer Prize, and has now brought it, intact and enhanced, to the screen.

The title refers to two parcels of Florida land: Glen Ross Farms, where the salesmen once made a killing, and Glengarry Highlands, the current stake, up for grabs. The past perfect tense gives way to the present imperative now -- because there's a dogfight among the four middle-aged men whose tough job it is to cozen the consumer. The top salesman will win a Cadillac; runner-up gets a set of steak knives. And third prize? Ask the cool executive (Alec Baldwin), himself a human steak knife, who has dropped by to explain the competition. "Third prize is you're fired."

Mamet's men talk for a living, and they talk to keep from telling the truth. In their four-letter world, lying comes with the territory. As the Old Man says in Strindberg's Ghost Sonata: "Silence hides nothing. Words conceal." Two of the salesmen, Moss (Ed Harris) and Aaronow (Alan Arkin), sit in a bar, grousing about the real estate company. It is as much a part of their job as sounding stardusted with sweet reason while on a pitch. Moss sketches an idea for a theft of the office, and later tells Aaronow he is implicated in the scheme. Aaronow asks, "And why is that?" Moss replies, "Because you listened."

The salesmen have to believe that listening implies complicity -- that the moment a mark is seated across the living room, or has just picked up a phone, he has declared himself a co-conspirator in the scam. Ace huckster Ricky Roma (Al Pacino) knows this better than anyone else. Lately, Ricky has been the "closer," the high man on the company's totem pole. And Shelley Levene (Jack Lemmon) is the Loman. Vending his unplowed dreams, Shelley woos like a Don Juan of property values. But when the courtship is over or aborted, he looks old, depleted, desperate. He sweats out loud.

Everybody here does. A peerless ensemble of actors fills Glengarry Glen Ross with audible glares and shudders. The play was zippy black comedy about predators in twilight; the film is a photo-essay, shot in morgue closeup, about the difficulty most people have convincing themselves that what they do matters. Only Ricky can summon that conviction. In a restaurant booth, we listen to him ramble through violent musings about the pilot light of evil that all men may kindle. It happens that this is a spiel to sucker a mark (Jonathan Pryce, all flustered pathos) into considering the purchase of land. But the speech is also designed to sell Ricky on his ability to make the sale. Before he can screw the customer, he needs to seduce himself.

In this convulsively entertaining parable, Ricky is the audience as well. We watch these zoo creatures and realize that we too are in the cage.