The first 25 minutes of David Mamet’s “Henry Johnson” are gripping. They are perhaps right up there with his best work, whether we’re talking the stage or screen. This first act does the audience a disservice though, writing a check that the rest of Mamet’s film can’t cash. Your palette is primed for top shelf, yes-folks-he’s-still-got-it Mamet, and you’re left with an uneven failure that eventually borders on self parody.
If you’re a Mamet head, and presumably they are the only people bothering to read this, see “Henry Johnson.” But be ready. Mamet heads should be ready anyway, as the risk is part of the juice with the work of the screenwriter, playwright, filmmaker, theater director and unexpected neoconservative. The risk of Mamet’s work is not only in offending audiences, but in succumbing to absurdity. The rap that Mamet has gotten as a man who discards theatrical pretensions to write how people talk has always been exaggerated. No one talks like Mamet’s characters unless they are imitating Mamet.
Mametese revels in unreality; in short, punchy, repetitive bursts of dialogue that are sometimes so obvious as to be surreal, and therefore sometimes not actually obvious. In Mamet’s 2001 movie “Heist,” Danny DeVito’s crook says “Everybody needs money. That’s why they call it money.” It’s a funny, pungent line, yet … what the hell does it mean? I think it’s a play on how money is so intensely ingrained into the fabric of our needs that it is irreducible. The word is a prime value. Or maybe the repetition just tickled Mamet. Rhythm is god in Mamet land.
We’re dropped right into the bath in “Henry Johnson.” No pillow shots or exposition, but immediate rhetorical combat. A junior executive, Henry (Evan Jonigkeit), is talking to his boss, Mr. Barnes (Chris Bauer). They are in Barnes’ office, which has a cavernous, wood-paneled look of affluence, and Henry is seeing if Barnes can promise a friend a job to potentially enable his release from prison. Barnes is reluctant, to put it lightly, and we understand that this conversation is an interrogation of Henry’s friendship with this other guy, and, by extension, of Henry’s character as a man.
Henry’s friend has committed an awful crime, tricking a woman into getting an abortion. The staccato dialogue blasts through the scenario quickly, allowing it to hit us on the rebound. One can applaud Mamet’s inventiveness in rigging sensationalistic outrage without taking it too seriously: He demonizes abortion, in a right-wing style, by emphasizing the victim’s female agency in a manner that’s associated with the left wing. Mamet’s dirty pool is superficial, but it does imbue this film’s first act with a lurid power that’s intensified by Bauer’s performance as Barnes.
Bauer is a veteran of Mamet theater and seasoned “that guy” in movies and television.
I’ve mostly seen Bauer as working-class schnooks, most memorably in the second season of “The Wire,” but in “Henry Johnson” he’s a slick and swaggering man of power with whom you are conditioned to empathize. Barnes takes Henry apart, casting Henry as a beta sucker for this unseen friend who has used and humiliated him since college, and Bauer makes a meal of this showy dialogue. Of course, Barnes is dominating Henry in a similar manner, his Mametese setting a trap for Henry that goes deeper than the mere exposure of the friend’s obvious exploitation.
The next act finds Henry in jail and sharing a cell with Gene (Shia LaBeouf), who proceeds to give another monologue that—after many detours— reveals itself to be another referendum on Henry’s gullibility and dwarfed masculinity. For act three, Henry holds hostage the prison librarian (Dominic Hoffman), which pivots on a monologue that, you might have guessed, is also concerned with Henry’s gullibility and thusly dwarfed masculinity. LaBeouf and Hoffman give forceful performances, and Hoffman’s aria of Mametese is predicated on a daring joke, but by this point the pleasure of Mamet’s absurdities has long faded.
After a while, Mamet’s showiness can’t obscure the fact that this material, which began as a play, doesn’t add up to much. As a white-collar patsy who might go feral, Henry rhymes theoretically with the title role of Mamet’s “Edmond,” which, especially in the film version with William H. Macy, had riveting sociopolitical implications, suggesting the hungers hidden underneath a sap’s exterior. Henry is just a sap, however, a punching bag for Mamet’s increasingly tired and boring riffs.
One may look for meaning here to justify the tedium of the film’s back hour, but ‘interpreting’ Mamet may be a fool’s errand. When his parables of force have force themselves, not to mention human bedrock, like “Glengarry Glen Ross” (especially the movie) or “House of Games,” they work smashingly. When they don’t, you have erudite tough-guy poetry that flexes itself into exhaustion.
With few exceptions, horror comedies suck. The comedy nulls the impact of the horror, inviting the audience to be above it all. But if you are so superior to the genre, then why are you going to a horror movie to begin with? The horror nulls the comedy too, as the frenetic murder stuff, rendered nonsense by the filmmakers’ lack of conviction, gets in the way of the jokes. Before you throw “Scream” in my face, two points: It’s overrated, and it’s a full-blooded horror movie with a sense of humor. That’s not the same as a glorified “SNL” sketch with violence, a la Eli Craig’s “Clown in a Cornfield.”
Quinn (Katie Douglas) is a capable and misunderstood teenager in the Jenna Ortega mode who is moved by her father (Aaron Abrams) to a fading Midwestern town that’s famous for its corn syrup, which has as its mascot a clown. This clown has become a symbol of the town, and several murders have been committed over the years by people dressing up as “Frendo.” Some of those murders were committed, spoiler alert, in a cornfield. Later on, other murders are committed, spoiler alert, in a cornfield.
Quinn falls into a “Breakfast Club” situation with a group of other kids, who enjoy staging fake Frendo videos to scare each other. That plot point suggests “Scream,” which also had teenagers who could barely be rattled from their media-induced stupor to be horrified by real murder. Frendo sets about killing people again, and Quinn and the others are involved in a game of stalk and slash that manages, despite the “Scream” cosplay, not to mean or allude to, well, anything.
The mayhem, which gets going after 45 minutes’ worth of throat-clearing, is proficiently staged by Craig, which is a nice way of saying that there’s nothing to say. How many more killer clowns do we need, especially given that “Terrifier” currently has the market cornered? This movie is so slick that it barely exists, and it made me miss, once again, the rough-hewn, quasi-competency of the slasher movies of the ‘70s and ‘80s.
Most of the slashers of yesteryear were awful, but they had texture, damn it. They had crude performances by actors who suggested people rather than magazine models, most of them appeared to be set in real places, and the violence had a certain latex-and-Karo syrup je ne sais quoi. Craftsmanship may have been limited, but it was hand craftsmanship. “Clown in a Cornfield” has the anonymous, guarded and half-assed self-consciousness that’s common of the product of our media-strangled age.
“Henry Johnson” can be rented at henryjohnsonmovie.com. “Clown in a Cornfield” is now in theaters.
