“Don’t you want to hear my last words?”
“I just did.”
David Mamet’s Heist embraces a tried-and-true formula: the labyrinthine caper. A love letter to the classic crime films of yore, Heist does not deviate far from the old-fashioned entertainment implied by its laughably generic title and promised by the retro monochrome Warner Bros. logo that opens the film. With creative freedom granted by the participation of Gene Hackman in one of his last starring roles, Mamet imbues his twisting narrative with his patented brand of unnatural, rich, pulpy dialogue that underscores what makes such films so enjoyable and compulsively watchable. Further Mamet-izing the blueprint, he surrounds his wildly entertaining heist with a series of reality-shifting double crosses that will feel familiar to those who’ve seen the writer-director’s earlier con films like House of Games; the type of sleight-of-hand rug-pulls that blindside the audience as much as the characters.
All of the characters are variations on clichés. Gene Hackman stars as Joe Moore, a man “so cool, when he goes to bed, sheep count him.” Joe is a master thief who runs a small professional crew consisting of the muscular ex-boxer Bobby Blane (Delroy Lindo), the nonchalant, no-nonsense utility man “Pinky” Pinkus (Mamet regular Ricky Jay), and Joe’s aloof, femme fatale wife Fran (Rebecca Pidgeon). After a cleverly conceived jewelry store theft results in Joe’s face getting captured on a closed circuit security camera, he elects to quit while he’s ahead, retire from the crime game and spend his twilight years on a handbuilt sailboat with Fran, whiling away his days in some sunnier region of the world. The only problem is his next project has already been “financialized” by his fence, Mickey Bergman (Danny DeVito), who decides to withhold payment from the jewelry store sting unless Joe does this one last job. And so, despite his jeopardized status, Joe finds himself undertaking “the Swiss job”—with one catch. Mickey is so enraged by Joe’s talk of retirement that he demands Joe work his hotheaded nephew/lackey Jimmy Silk (Sam Rockwell) into the scheme so that Mickey can ensure Joe doesn’t split town.
Many of the pleasures of Heist come from watching our contentious band of thieves plan and execute the Swiss job—arguing over logistics, speaking in code, rigging bombs, gathering information. Most of the setup is impossible to understand until the carefully executed plan unfolds before our eyes. With great verve, Mamet walks us through a complex airport swindle where the team grounds a plane and lifts a substantial shipment of Swiss gold out of its cargo hold while attention is diverted elsewhere. They pilfer the gold and escape unnoticed but interpersonal conflicts between members of Joe’s team threaten to derail his plans once again. Everyone except Bobby treats Joe as if he’s lost a mental step in his old age: Jimmy tries to take various situations into his own trigger-happy hands; when Fran is sent to seduce Jimmy for information she ends up falling for him. It is Joe’s insistence on backup plans for his backup plans that ultimately prevails. Indeed, seemingly every setback is compensated for by a crafty contingency plan, and some of Joe’s mental missteps prove to be calculated showmanship.
The film builds up to an incredible dockside shootout that involves a bunch of gangsters who’ve clearly avoided such situations their entire lives. It’s a refreshing change of pace from the rapid-fire chaos of similar scenarios, capped off wonderfully by Mickey wandering into the middle of the firefight and foolishly trying to make peace.
Where the film suffers in reputation, but ultimately reveals Mamet’s brilliance, is in its combination of genres. What begins as a heist movie with its intricate setup and execution eventually shifts into a con film replete with double and triple crosses. It becomes difficult to track what actions pertain to the Swiss job, which belong to Joe’s plan to rid his crew of the overbearing presence of Jimmy Silk, which betrayals are legitimate and which are ploys. In either standalone genre, something will be fixed in place—the protagonists’ identities, the victims of deception. There’s solid ground somewhere, in your typical con/heist film. But in Mamet’s film there’s an ever-shifting perception of what is legitimate and what is posturing that slightly distracts from the details of the heist. Mamet’s densely layered screenplay, with powerhouse performances to match it, allows a rewatch to hold new rewards as one will take notice of subtle hints that delineate the fluid allegiances. And while Mamet-speak doesn’t always work for me, the actors here, especially Hackman, seem entirely suited to the writer’s quaint staccato rhythms. It’s a joy to simply luxuriate in their chewing of the dialogue. “She could talk her way out of a sunburn.” “I want you to be as quiet as an ant not pissing on cotton.” “Everyone needs money! That’s why they call it money!” “Hand of God, that bible stopped a bullet, would have ruined that man’s heart. And had he had another Bible in front of his face, that man would be alive today.”
Mamet is often hit with the old “style over substance” argument. That’s potentially true here, but while his script is indeed very stylish with its incendiary wordplay, it is that deliberately evasive speech that makes the film so much fun. As written, we never get a full read on Joe. His plans to leave town might be real; or maybe they are thrown out to test his team’s loyalty; or maybe they are floated to thin out his ranks so he can grab a larger share for himself. It takes a lot of skill to write like that and then coax such slippery performances out of a cast. Well, maybe Hackman is just that good.