Transcribing Mamet's Oleanna

I like David Mamet. If there is one director/screenwriter who is best at the snappy dialogue, it’s Mamet. House of Games (1987) and Heist (2001) are two of my favorite examples of my favorite genre—the confidence game or the heist. I consider the two kind of interchangeable, after all, even though one is the other but the other isn’t necessarily the one. Yeah, it’s confusing. Think rectangle and square…

I taught an Introduction to Drama class for sophomore university students a few years ago, and Mamet’s Oleanna was included in our text book. Since my reasoning that semester was to only teach things I had never read, I included it on the syllabus, and my students had a hard time with it. Everything the professor did that was “wrong” was so subtle that my students couldn’t see it.

The movie version loses that subtlely. Because we generally watch movies in a single sitting, we watch the three acts of Mamet’s Oleanna (1992) one right after the other, and the professor’s “badness” really shines through. Even though we may not pay attention to what he does in the first act, when the student brings it up in the second, it’s blatant that, yes, he committed those wrong actions.

Most of you are lost, I know. This film is not well-known, and for good reason, I think. Mamet was attempting something different here: to film a play as a movie. A movie with only two speaking characters. And no music. And have the actors act like they were acting in a play.

But a play is not the same medium as a movie, and simply changing a few camera angles doesn’t make for a good movie. It’s tedious and, well, boring. The dialogue is typical Mamet fare, but we’re forced to listen to a professor who speaks like your boring college English professor; you know, the one who used all of those big words without explaining them, the one whose convoluted sentences required diagramming to understand them, the one who could never get to a point because he said he wasn’t trying to preach but to make you think. Damn that guy, right?

Damn straight. And here he is again. In the play, I respond to it because I can slow down and read it. In his movie incarnation, the professor becomes sometimes incomprehensible, and his incomprehensibility is purposeful, I think, to demonstrate the student’s perceptions of him.

But wait, did you say there were only two speaking characters? Yep, a teacher and a student. It’s weird. Let’s just say that the teacher tries to “help” the student and the student then vies for power. The three acts are basically the three versions of who holds power in the student/teacher relationship. That part is really compelling, too.

The bad part is that the girl is left holding the cards at the end. Sure, the teacher can overpower her, but she wins in the end. She claims she just wants understanding, but that’s what he wanted, too, right? It’s all a vie for power between groups who have it and groups who do not.

Wow. This blog entry has failed, I know. It failed because I’m rambling, but also because I’m rambling about a provocative movie that most of you have not seen. Where I want to go off discussing the film, I’m forced to step back and try to explain what happens in it, and that just ruins it.

Grade for Oleanna: 5