Cynthia W. Gentry

By Cynthia W. Gentry, © 2000 by Cynthia W. Gentry, published on Dailygossip.com, October 2000.

For the true movie lover, film festivals present a problem. You’re confronted with a dizzying smorgasbord of independent movies, so you’re tempted to stick with the tried and true. The reasoning goes something like this: “If it’s got Parker Posey, it must be halfway good—remember ‘House of Yes’?” I face a similar conundrum when confronted with my closet each morning, which is why I usually dress in black. Not creative or daring, but safe, always in style and most importantly, slimming.

But to make safe choices invokes a particular psychological syndrome called Film Festival Guilt. Those that suffer from it torture themselves with questions like: “Can I skip that new release filmed on Super-8 by feminist liberation theologists from Uzbekistan and not be part of the male patriarchial system?” and “If I see ‘Billy Elliott’ instead of that this obscure Greek film, will I miss this year’s ‘Il Postino’?”

Take it from me: you won’t. Because chances are, that obscure Greek film will be so bad you’ll be able to see the screen stink. This is what I discovered recently at the Austin Film Festival, where I suffered through a godawful mess called, for reasons I dare not imagine, “Black Milk.” I don’t want to start an international incident, but my guess is that the title lost something in the translation.

Stumbling out of “Black Milk,” I realized that I would never get those two hours of my life back. So I decided to abandon my usual festival-viewing strategy of giving the little guy a chance. I went to see the new David Mamet film “State and Main.” It proved to be an ever better decision than last-year’s purchase of knee-high black leather boots, especially when I discovered that the Paramount Theater in Austin serves a decent chardonnay.

“State and Main” is a joy from beginning to end, and when it opens later this year—or for the majority of us, in January 2001—you’ll be doing yourself a big disservice if you miss it. The story of a movie crew that invades a small town and gets more than they bargained for, “State and Main” has the look of a film that the cast and crew just had a hell of a good time making.

It helps to have David Mamet as your screenwriter and director. The dialogue in “State and Main” is sheer genius; I’ll have to see the film again just to catch the lines that were drowned out by laughter. Yes, we’ve all seen films before that lampoon Hollywood types, but Mamet takes those stereotypes, pushes them a degree further, adds a dark edge, and then throws them up against a slice of small-town Americana. Or at least what we think is small-town Americana. In “State and Main,” everyone has an agenda.

William H. Macy shines as Walt Price, the film-within-a-film’s director. (“Like I would ever eat carbs,” is one of the many memorable lines Macy gets to deliver with relish; I won’t tell you the situation.) Alec Baldwin and Sarah Jessica Parker riff on their own celebrity personas, and the ever-omnipresent and ever-brilliant Philip Seymour Hoffman gets to play a romantic lead as Joseph Turner White, the beleaguered writer who’s struggling to re-write his script. White finds himself attracted to bookstore owner and town drama coach Annie Black, played with quirky straightforwardness by Mamet’s wife Rebecca Pidgeon. Add Charles Durning as the town’s mayor and David Paymer as studio executive Marty Rossen, and you’ve got an embarrassment of riches.

Some movie critics seems to believe that reviewing a film means simply recounting the plot, like a grown-up version of a junior high book report. Not me, which is why I won’t tell you much about “State and Main.” I don’t want to take even the slightest chance or ruining the fun for you. The plot twists in this film are all foreshadowed, yet each turns out to be a surprise.

Now kids, don’t take my earlier comments to mean that you should avoid film festivals, even though they’re sprouting up faster than Britney Spears wannabes. If it weren’t for Cinequest, San Jose’s film festival, I would have never had the chance to enjoy the work of a pre-“Sopranos” Edie Falco in “Cost of Living,” nor would I have had the chance to hear Alec Baldwin talk about making “State and Main” in the oh-so-hot flesh. (I still haven’t washed the shoulder Alec touched when he leaned in discuss voter registration with me, but this is not a column about personal hygiene.)

Just give yourself enough time to enjoy the whole spectrum of festival experiences, from those little movies shot on digital video by the next Steven Soderbergh to the “big” films that festival programmers have to put on the schedule to sell tickets. There’s no better way to experience, as my fellow columnist and bon vivante ChristopherG describes it, the dream that is cinema. A dream that in “State and Main,” with all its self-referential jokes, comes true.

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