This movie's all about the acting and the dialogue, and both are great. David Paymer and William H. Macy in particular stand out, with perfect comic timing (Macy gets most of the good lines). Julia Stiles shines in her brief appearances as the teenager intent on seducing Alec Baldwin (she's got great eyebrow moves). Baldwin and Sarah Jessica Parker are both fun as stereotypical self-absorbed stars who prattle on about art and what's best for the movie when they're really interested only in what's best for themselves. Philip Seymour Hoffman does his shy, neurotic thing quite well and makes Mamet's trademark staccato dialogue sound natural. The only weak link in the cast, as in most Mamet movies, is Rebecca Pidgeon, who -- no coincidence -- is Mamet's wife. She always sounds smug and over-rehearsed; "Look, Ma, I'm acting!" And she couldn't muster up an actual facial expression if you held a gun to her head.
It's a nice angle that you find yourself rooting for the admittedly sleazy Hollywood folks when it comes down to a legal crisis (or maybe that was just me). The good people of sleepy little Waterford turn out to be just as venal and conniving as their guests. (It reminded me of the Simpsons episode in which a Hollywood crew descends on Springfield only to find themselves gouged by greedy local merchants and politicians; they flee and are warmly welcomed back to Hollywood and consoled over their encounter with the cruel small-town people. Though no one goes so far as to charge the movie people a "pants tax" in State and Main, they're not far off.)
The movie is far sillier in spots than one expects of Mamet (for example, we catch a brief glimpse of a glossy tabloid spread about Baldwin's character, which notes that his "dislikes" are French movies and cruelty). He's got more laugh-out-loud lines than I remember in any of his other movies; in fact, I think this is his first real comedy (not counting the script job he did on Wag the Dog, which wasn't funny anyway, so never mind). One amazingly prescient line got the biggest laugh: Pidgeon and Hoffman have a sort of romance going on, and when she catches him in his hotel room with a naked Parker, he stumbles through an explanation and then admits that it's absurd. "So's our electoral process," Pidgeon replies, "but we still vote." (Yes, the movie was completed well before the election.)
We don't get to see more than a few seconds of the movie being shot, which is just as well, because it looks stultifying. But the State and Main website contains a link to a clever site for the movie within the movie, where we learn that director Walt Price (Macy) gained fame through such films as Gandhi 2 and Pigtails of Fury, an action film starring the Olsen twins, and that screenwriter Joseph Turner White (Hoffman) often uses "nuns and fire" as important symbols in his work.
I definitely recommend this smart, funny movie.
One gaffe bugged me, though -- it may seem small, but it's a major plot trigger. At the beginning of the movie, the mayor invites the Hollywood folk to dinner at his place. Eager to curry favor with the local authority, Macy accepts and notes the date -- the 12th -- on his dry-erase board. A careless crew member brushes by the board and partially wipes off the dinner note. Macy directs her to re-write it, and she does -- clearly, under the 12th, in green marker over the red marker she wiped off. Making such a big deal of such a minor action clearly signaled this was going to be a plot point, so it struck me that she wrote the date correctly. Yet, toward the end of the movie, we see a shot of the dinner note written in green marker under the 13th, with much more visible remnants of the red note in the adjacent day. It's piddling stuff, but it's the kind of minor mistake -- not to mention flagrant signaling of plot triggers -- that Mamet has a problem with, as I notice by going back and reading my review of The Spanish Prisoner.
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