Like so many ambitious writers, David Mamet
has many faces. There's the street-smart thriller craftsman behind Homicide, Heist, and Spartan. The sly, stagey
twist-meister behind House Of Games, The Spanish Prisoner, and Glengarry Glen
Ross. The
sentimental softie of Things Change and State And Main. (There's also the
work-for-hire hack that signed onto the screenplay for Hannibal, and the clumsy,
self-satisfied provocateur who wrote Oleanna, but the less said about
them, the better.) But no previous project has so thoroughly fused his
filmmaking facets as Redbelt, a superior, sophisticated, and unusually gentle
character study where the point isn't the twists, so much as watching how one
man's belief system holds up through them.
Further cementing his well-earned
reputation for sensitivity and depth, Chiwetel Ejiofor (Dirty Pretty Things, Children Of Men) stars as a small-time jujitsu
instructor with an unyielding sense of honor that comes into play when jittery
lawyer Emily Mortimer causes an accident at his street-front dojo. From there,
the plot unfolds in several directions, with an oppressive sense of
inevitability standing in for a clear, linear plotline. Ejiofor's business is
failing, as his wife (Alice Braga) curtly informs him, and the Mortimer
incident may be the last straw. A chance encounter with a drunken, slumming
Hollywood star (Tim Allen, in a surprisingly internal performance) may help,
but Braga's brother, a sleazy fight promoter, pulls in another direction by
trying to get Ejiofor involved in a pro mixed-martial-arts tournament. As with
the best of Mamet's scripts, it isn't clear where any of this is going until
the threads suddenly, thunderously collide.
The film unravels a bit in the last few
moments, amid unanswered story questions and a simplistic climax, but until
that moment, Redbelt is Mamet's richest film of the decade. Having spent five
years studying jujitsu himself, he's well familiar with the varying types of
people who take up martial arts, and the complicated, insular scenes they
create. His story is as steeped in the many mentalities of fighting as his past
standout works were steeped in the language of police precincts and con
artists. And while the physical combat is minimal—this is a character
drama, not a traditional martial-arts film—the emotional battles are
immense. Abandoning much of his familiar, artificially mannered dialogue, Mamet
brings them across with a narrative directness that belies the complicated story,
and Ejiofor adds in a riveting determination and strength. There's a sense that
they both care immensely about what they're doing here, and that, above
everything else, makes Redbelt stand out from Mamet's past experiments, games,
and genre exercises.