What an intriguing movie this is.
In David Mamet's third film, Joe Mantegna plays Bobby Gold, a cop who's Jewish but cares not to identify with that part of himself. He's just a cop, happy working the big cases. So when he backs himself into the investigation of a murder of an old Jewish shopkeeper, small potatoes that it is, he's pissed when the woman's son, a prominent Jewish doctor, pulls strings to keep him on the case because of his last name. Over the course of the investigation he begins to feel something about being Jewish.
But in a way that's not really what the film is about either, because the story shares a trait common in much of Mamet's work, which is to say that what you're shown is only a curtain hiding what you're not. To say too much would be to give too much away, but suffice to say there seems to be a lot of Edmond in the character of Bobby Gold (and, incidentally, Macy co-stars as Mantegna's partner), and I think the story is less about a Jew realizing he's Jewish than a self-hater realizing how much he hates himself.
In David Mamet's third film, Joe Mantegna plays Bobby Gold, a cop who's Jewish but cares not to identify with that part of himself. He's just a cop, happy working the big cases. So when he backs himself into the investigation of a murder of an old Jewish shopkeeper, small potatoes that it is, he's pissed when the woman's son, a prominent Jewish doctor, pulls strings to keep him on the case because of his last name. Over the course of the investigation he begins to feel something about being Jewish.
But in a way that's not really what the film is about either, because the story shares a trait common in much of Mamet's work, which is to say that what you're shown is only a curtain hiding what you're not. To say too much would be to give too much away, but suffice to say there seems to be a lot of Edmond in the character of Bobby Gold (and, incidentally, Macy co-stars as Mantegna's partner), and I think the story is less about a Jew realizing he's Jewish than a self-hater realizing how much he hates himself.
