By Armond White

Redbelt
Directed by David Mamet


David Mamet’s Redbelt is not the usual martial arts drama—and that’s not a good thing. By extraordinary coincidence, this existential programmer—about a man struggling to behave honorably in a corrupt environment—shares the same themes as last month’s Never Back Down, the visually alive, deftly effective teenage action film. But Mamet’s self-seriousness stifles Redbelt’s cinematic potential. It’s so tightly structured it offers no surprises—especially not the satisfaction of watching action-movie conventions reward a shared sense of morality.

That’s because Mamet attempts to transform a genre flick into a jeremiad. Redbelt preaches about a perfidious society that isolates a lone man of principle, black jiu-jitsu instructor Mike Terry (Chiwetel Ejiofor). Mike’s philosophical approach to the physical art he teaches in his Southside Los Angeles academy also tests modern ideas about masculinity, courage and trust—virtues sharply but repeatedly stated in every line of dialogue and terse bit of action. Yet in Never Back Down, these same issues bloomed; they expanded, naturally, from the way Sean Faris and Djimon Hounsou carried themselves. Seeing stress physicalized made the movie spectacular, giving every moment vivid—even existential—potentialities. That’s what good movies do. But from Redbelt’s first close-up images of symbolic objects, then a poorly framed jiu-jitsu lesson, all we get is intentions.

It’s kinda funny to see a cagey and accomplished playwright-filmmaker like Mamet outfoxed by an unpretentious action flick. Mike Terry toils in a Hollywood that Mamet clearly means to represent a contemporary Sodom and Gomorrah, where wealth goes unquestioned and favors are easily granted and then betrayed. In a few scenes as movie star Chet Frank, Tim Allen humanizes sodden decadence beyond mere villainy. But this vision of corruption (with a limited cast of Mike’s harried wife, his cop student, a panicky lawyer, various Hollywood scum—all dramaturgical pawns) is less alive than the moral atmosphere of Never Back Down. The startling contrast of Sean Faris’ working-class jock confronting the nouveau-riche Florida neighborhood of side-by-side, Donald Trump–vulgar mansions gave surreal immediacy to the new-kid-in-town premise. Never Back Down allowed audiences to share a young man’s introduction to life’s complexities. Wrestling society’s moral traps (using The Iliad, his high school text, as a guide) was part of his personal and familial struggle—also made vivid by director Jeff Wadlow. But chivalrous Mike Terry, seeking jiu-jitsu’s redbelt as the ultimate sign of discipline and accomplishment, is a cliché older than knighthood.

And Mamet knows it. In his current Broadway play November, he turns a contemporary political satire into a bad sitcom. It’s a trifle—deliberately designed to both talk down to the audience and confirm Mamet’s knowledge of ethics and supposed mastery of form. But unpretentious action flicks historically provide more sensual pleasure and emotional depth than Mamet’s compressed moralizing. Redbelt proves that we’ve passed the period when B-movies were valued for incidental artistry—the evidence of intelligence, sensibility and style that made action directors from Phil Karlson to Walter Hill extraordinary. Mamet’s own hyper-capitalist arrogance confuses movie art with tendentiousness. But it’s not just Mamet’s personal problem; it’s related to modern film culture’s inability to appreciate expressive cinema (especially when it arrives without pedigree like Never Back Down). Only the most obvious kinds of meaning-laden pretense get taken seriously (as with There Will Be Blood). Mamet thinks he’s doing something greater than Karate Kid; while Jeff Wadlow—like a decathlete in mid-air—transcended it.

Jean-Luc Godard recently addressed this Redbelt problem, telling an interviewer about the New Wave’s “recognition of a director’s contribution as a creator of images as opposed to the screenwriter. It was about treating the grammar of cinema as an independent visual grammar and saving [what] was invented by certain silent film directors—Griffith, for example. It’s a grammar of narrative imagery which must constantly be renewed to ward off stereotypes and routine. And which places an image in relation to previous images. There are still films that stake claims for this position. But it’s harder to make them. Not because it’s harder to find the money. But the ideas that we had then have disappeared; they aren’t being renewed.”

Strange that Redbelt assays the action-movie form associated with exercising the passions of ethnic-urban audiences but then ignores that potential. Mamet’s disdain for vulgar Hollywood action filmmaking puts a deadening, artsy overlay on what we think of as Jim Kelly, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Steven Seagal material and robs it of immediacy. Those action heroes renewed the way audiences saw their own everyday frustrations. Casting Chiwetel Ejiofor is a fascinating ploy, especially for an artist as fraught with racial tension as Mamet. The one visually interesting moment dissolves from Mike assuring a female student “There’s nobody here but the fighters” into a silhouette of Ejifor’s handsome afro. It objectifies him to no effect. Unlike Kelly, Van Damme and Seagal, Mike has no social background; he’s all concept, a materialized saint—part Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, part Terry Malloy from On the Waterfront. His wife’s accusation, “You’re addicted to poverty!” suggests that Mike seeks purity; but Mamet fumbles the noir plot’s double-crosses and loses any urgent, real-world motivation. Ejiofor’s gallantry (he speaks calmly during moments of stress) is never so beautiful as the full-out emotion of a real action star, and he lacks the credibility that the naturally iconic Hounsou and Faris brought to their characters’ Oedipal issues and their big, rousing fight scenes. Mamet’s climactic fight not only lacks style, atmosphere and clarity, it lacks triumph. 

Yet, I’m partially sympathetic to Mamet’s dumbed-down art moves. His best films got a raw deal: Stuart Gordon’s brainy, briny B-movie adaptation of Mamet’s play Edmund was critically ignored. So was Mamet’s own 1999 film The Winslow Boy, a period piece (from Terence Rattigan’s 1949 play) shrewdly conceived to reflect the very contemporary twisted morality of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair. Through Rattigan’s phrase “Let Right Be Done,” Mamet found the distance and tact to address public fascination with scandal while questioning moral turpitude. He neared the Shavian heights he’s always envied, yet reviewers only noticed the film’s Merchant-Ivory surface. No wonder Mamet put his intentions before sensations in Redbelt. This rigid film grammar goes back to the claustrophobic style of his earliest movies: The intrigue of human experience is reduced to a house of word games.