Buy posters from this movie

Sadly, however, those expectations are rarely met. The success of a film with only a handful of players and a static setting hinges on riveting characters and dialogue. If the viewer is expected to sit around watching a few characters that are also sitting around and talking for an hour and a half, those characters had damn well better have some interesting things to say and plenty of them. In addition, a sense of mounting tension is crucial, as with a thriller like Deterrence, (in which the President and a small staff must decide the nuclear fate of the world from a snowbound diner in the Colorado mountains.)

Unfortunately, American Buffalo produces precious little of the former and even less of the latter. Though occasionally funny, the dialogue is really not that sharp and well below the usual standards a Mamet fan could expect. We are introduced to a trio of small-time hoods. Donny Dubrow (Franz) runs the antiques store in question, which he also uses to run after-hours card games. However, when a coin collector knowingly purchases a rare buffalo nickel from him at a fraction of its real worth, Dubrow becomes furious and decides to get back a the collector by robbing his coin collection and anything else of value in his house (never mind that it was Donny’s own fault that he got taken for a ride, since he was too stupid to look up the actual value of the coin before he sold it – some antiques dealer). He initially decides to take Bob (Sean Nelson) with him on the job. Bob is Donny’s teenaged protégé, a former street kid and drug addict who Donny took in and helped get back on his feet (although graduating him from drug abuse and street crime to home invasion and robbery is an interesting method of reform). However, Donny’s friend “Teach” (Hoffman) talks Donny out of taking Bob along, volunteering to go along in his place. Donny isn’t a complete idiot, however, and fully realizes that the sleazy Teach is motivated solely by his desire for part of the take, rather than any altruistic concerns about Bobby’s safety. As the hour of the impending heist approaches, however, their not-so-carefully laid plans begin to unravel, causing the three to question each other’s loyalties.

The only problem is, nobody really cares. These characters are so generic and thinly drawn that it’s difficult to muster any curiosity as to who may be double-crossing whom. The character of Donny behaves so inconsistently that it’s difficult to get a read on him – He takes in street kids and gives them a new start, yet makes plans to rob a customer who managed to get a good deal because of Donny’s own ignorance about the items he sells. He is fiercely overprotective of Bobby when Teach harasses him, yet stands by and does nothing when Teach smashes the kid over the head. And Franz’s performance seems somewhat reigned in, even compared to his earlier television roles. Sean Nelson is quite bland, and gives off the air of a suburbanized middle-class black kid, rather than a hardened street youth. Hoffman is Hoffman – which is to say that his performance is competent as usual, but one gets the impression that he had Carrot Top dial down the center for him when he phoned in his portrayal of Teach. It’s a decent, solid performance, but he’s given much better, and it’s hard to invest much into his generically sleazy character anyway. But the biggest problem is the dialogue. Occasionally it’s crisp and funny, but far too often it meanders into obscure realms where the characters make inside jokes or references that the viewer can only guess at, or refer constantly to other characters who are never introduced or elaborated upon. There is little sense of tension, nor any dramatically sound resolution. American Buffalo seems to end rather abruptly - but not a moment too soon.

Simply put, what AMERICAN BUFFALO needed was some balls, in the form of a grittier and more focused script. Where is Alec Baldwin spitting vituperations about “fucking steak knives” when you need him? Why, it’s in Mamet’s earlier film, GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS, which I would recommend that you watch instead of this.

link directly to this review at http://www.hollywoodbitchslap.com/review.php?movie=630&reviewer=258
originally posted: 09/08/03 01:13:19
 printer-friendly format