Lakeboat

(recommended)

Directed from David Mamet’s 1975 play by Mamet regular Joe Mantegna, Lakeboat has everything you’ve come to expect from Mamet’s cosmos: male bonding, over-the-top vulgarity and misogyny, language used as a bludgeoning tool, the works. In that respect, the (screen)play’s a cruder version of what Mamet went on to do in Glengarry Glen Ross, or especially American Buffalo. But at the heart of the film is a spectacularly soulful performance by Robert Foster, who plays the ship’s cook who becomes a mentor to young Dale (Mamet’s younger brother Tony), a grad student picking up some summertime cash by signing onto a boat shipping steel from Chicago to Canada across Lake Michigan. As a sad-eyed man who’s all but given up on the future, Forster’s face is as scarred as the old freighter’s hull, his movements slow with defeat. (He’s like a seaborne Willy Loman.) As weatherbeaten but more upbeat, the old hands played by Mamet regulars J.J. Johnston and Jack Wallace toss insults back and forth like kids playing catch; their heated argument over the "toughness" of a certain movie star is a minor classic. The film doesn’t have much visual sophistication, and the decision to dramatize the characters’ musings about the fate of a former crewmate (played by a non-speaking Andy Garcia) robs the piece of immediacy. (It’s probably better than having to watch the characters natter on for several minutes, but perhaps the material should simply have been excised.) But the performances from a cast that also includes Charles Durning, George Wendt, Peter Falk and Denis Leary, are both tough and tender.

—Sam Adams

(See Sam Adams’ interview with director Joe Mantegna.)