Lost and Found. - Review - movie review

National Review, Feb 5, 2001 by John Simon

The very acting is largely unimpressive. Sean Connery relies on his by now habitual growl, to which dentures add a further alienating effect; Rob Brown, a 16-year-old newcomer discovered after a long search, plays Jamal with a wooden sincerity that a shorter search could have matched. Anna Paquin, the rare child actor developing into a real star, is lovely as Claire, but the part is small and unrewarding.

-- David Mamet is no favorite of mine, but State and Main, about a movie company filming something called The Old Mill in a small New England town, and the entanglements between the movie people and the locals, makes for a fizzy small-scale entertainment. There is the leading man (Alec Baldwin) with an appetite for very young girls, and the willing teenager (Julia Stiles) who ends up exploiting him; the leading lady (Sarah Jessica Parker) who does not want to bare her breasts, contract notwithstanding; the fuddy-duddy scenarist (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who cannot do rewrites without his lost manual typewriter; and the bookstore owner (Rebecca Pidgeon) who provides him with another, gets involved with him, and ditches her ambitious politician fiance (Clark Gregg).

Also the harried director (William H. Macy) who must improvise desperately to keep his menagerie together; the cheesy producer (the superb David Paymer) who must squeeze out more money; the local mayor and his ambitious wife (Charles Durning and Patti LuPone) who want to give a dinner party for the film's principals; and an old mill crucial to the filming, which, however, burned down years ago.

Everything goes comically wrong in this tidy screenplay graced with expert performances. Even Miss Pidgeon (who in actual life is Mrs. Mamet), for the first time in her spouse-sponsored career, manages to be appealing. Only Miss Parker, a one-woman Agent Orange, makes a role meant to be merely ludicrous intolerable. Still, the film shows what Mamet can do when he does not try too hard to be devious, portentous, and Pinteresque.