American Buffalo

American Buffalo

Like Willy Loman’s kitchen or Lear’s blasted heath or wherever the hell it is where they wait for Godot, Don’s antique shop in “American Buffalo” has become one of the essential spaces of theater. In it David Mamet created a long day and night during which Don and Teach, and later Bobby, restlessly waited and talked about a job they were going to do, while they uneasily wondered if they should, or could, do it.

The heart of “American Buffalo,” and all of Mamet’s plays, is in the characters’ vernacular. They have a way of implying just what they’re thinking when they don’t mean to imply anything at all. “If I could come up with some of that stuff you were interested in,” Teach asks Don, “would you be interested in it?” And “the only way to teach these people is to kill them.” And when a gun enters into the plot: “God forbid something inevitable occurs.” The store is an ill-lighted space filled with things we cannot imagine there being much demand for.

Don (Dennis Franz) has made it into a sort of warren for himself; in this film version by Michael Corrente there are alcoves and mezzanines receding into the shadows caves of tarnished treasure. We gather that Don supports himself by means other than selling these things. Teach (Dustin Hoffman) hangs out in the store too; he and Don engage in endless desultory conversation talk filled with possibilities, eventualities, potentialities, hypotheses and folk wisdoms. Bobby (Sean Nelson), the black kid who works for Don, does not know very well what his employer does but knows some and wants to know more.

The action involves a possible theft from within the store itself a coin collection. A man named Fletch may help them steal it. Much is made of Fletch: He looms large in their contemplation. When he doesn’t show up as expected, various fallback options are considered. “What a day,” Don and Teach keep saying, as if the day had created them instead of them having created the day.

Some plays have their real life on stage. “American Buffalo” is such a play–or, at least, it is not a play that comes alive in this movie. I’ve seen the play more than once, most memorably in London with Al Pacino and J.J. Johnston; I never tire of it because the language contains such rich humor just beneath the surface. It’s not funny (although sometimes we do laugh); it’s an elaborate playwright’s joke.

Mamet, like one of his characters, invents a labyrinthine, convoluted spiel leading nowhere and distracts us with words while not producing a rabbit from his hat.The insight here, I think, is that these characters do this every day: Perched uneasily in the darkness of that store; uncomfortable with light and normality outside; they make plans and plans and plans.

They are trapped on the stage in their own space and time. Although this movie has opened up action very minimally, they seem more free than before. More importantly, they seem to believe that their plans are more pressing. In some way Dustin Hoffman appears to try too much tries to think his thoughts and express them so it won’t work for him. Teach isn’t in on anything; Teach doesn’t realize that nothing’s going to happen and he sort of knows it.

It would be wrong for Teach to give us a sign, a wink. It’d be wrong for Teach to let us see that he knows this is dialogue and performance and no payoff. But the wink should be underneath somewhere. At a deeper level the performance should indicate for us that Teach’s been down this road before–that the road is all there is for Teach, Pacino could show us that; but Hoffman has a little too much sincerity.

Dennis Franz does succeed as Don: He doesn’t care one way or another; he waits here forever (this is his store); while they come by to let him see them live their lives with their friends who act them out in front of him: Teach comes into being because Don sits in a store which he owns and provides Bobby with an audience & foil which makes the character of Bobby relatively unimportant though Sean Nelson (who was so great as a child actor in “Fresh”) pitches it exactly right here: Bobby isn’t onto everything; he doesn’t know these things have been done over & over again since time out of mind; Bobby thinks Don & Teach are real people.

The movie never really brings its inner secrets to life, so it feels slow–and then at the end, long. It lacks James Foley’s film version of Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross” energy or risk or danger language all there joy irony missing about irony.

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