Magnificent Acting in Mamet and Mantegna's Lakeboat

For some people, the prospect of being trapped on a boat with a bunch of David Mamet characters sounds like hell on Earth. So much cynicism, profanity and melancholy regret packed into such a confined space?and the characters can't even step out for a drink. And yet Lakeboat?about a young man spending a summer on a Great Lakes cargo vessel with a band of grizzled old sea salts?turns out to be the warmest, most laid-back, most humane film ever to be based on a David Mamet script. It's a small movie that doesn't pretend to be big; yet it has a largeness of spirit, and an eagerness to surprise us with small, exquisitely true observations about how men talk to each other.

Why is Lakeboat so good? It might be because veteran actor and Mamet collaborator Joe Mantegna directed it, instead of Mamet himself. The marvelous State and Main notwithstanding, Mamet typically directs his own material in a way that protects his trademarked cadences at the expense of lively performances. It's as if his actors are not asserting creative ownership of the characters for a couple of hours, but are merely being permitted to license them while the creator hovers nearby to make sure they don't damage the merchandise. The older men of Lakeboat?Robert Forster, Charles Durning, J.J. Johnston, Jack Wallace, George Wendt, Peter Falk and Denis Leary, who's so cranky he's an honorary old guy?are such an eccentric, complicated bunch that they couldn't go bland if they wanted to. They assert ownership of their characters from the moment they step onscreen.

A more intriguing explanation for Lakeboat's warmth might lie in the fact that the story is based on Mamet's own experience working on a Great Lakes cargo vessel. Lakeboat was first produced on the stage in 1970; Mamet must have written it when he was still young enough to remember not just the general details of his experience, but how it actually felt to be young on the water while surrounded by much older men.

The autobiographical component is compounded by the presence of Mamet's brother, actor Tony Mamet, in the lead role. He plays Dale Katzman, an Ivy League college student trying to earn some pocket money as a lake-boat cook over the summer. Beyond that, we don't know much about Dale?and those who expect a gradual unfolding of personal detail will be disappointed. There are no profound emotional revelations from this kid, no obvious life lessons and no tearful hugs, thank God. Mostly, he just watches and listens.

Elmore Leonard once said his stories were popular because he left out the parts people skip. Mamet observes the same philosophy here. He knows we don't really care about a young man's spiritual and intellectual progress; we can only pretend to care. And Mamet doesn't ask us to. (When's the last time you saw a coming-of-age story and said, "Boy, I really wish we'd learned more about the sensitive, questing young hero"? Remember how bored you were when Charlie Sheen's Platoon hero read letters to his grandma in voiceover?) It's the supporting characters who make us laugh or wince or lean forward in our seats to catch every word. Mamet and Mantegna know this, so they give the floor to the veterans and never ask them to yield. It's such a delightful, crowd-pleasing way to tell this sort of story that it's a wonder more filmmakers haven't tried it.

The upshot is that Dale remains a cipher, an audience surrogate, a sounding board for his older contemporaries. That's okay, because compared to old men, young men?even the aggressively quirky and driven ones?are essentially blank slates. The other characters are positively bursting with life (in the case of Durning and Wendt, that description has a visual corollary). They're hard-drinkers, big eaters and most of them are womanizers?or claim to be. They're the kind of men who use the word "fuck" as noun, verb, adverb, adjective and interjection, and say the word more often when they're happy. They bust each other's balls every minute of every day because?well, just because. (Sample dialogue: "Boy, did I get laid last night." "One of the lads on the boat?")

Every performer is excellent?including the uncredited Andy Garcia as a legendary hell-raising night cook who vanished without explanation, and whose possible fate is explored in wordless fantasy sequences. But a few loom larger than the rest. Charles Durning, for one. As the skipper of the boat, he asserts the privileges of bosshood while acknowledging his smallness in the greater scheme of things (it is only a lake-boat, after all). He also has unexpected bursts of compassion, but doesn't go gooey on us. Take the scene where he tells Dale his secret method for removing scuff marks from cabinet doors. His conspiratorial tone suggests he's chock-full of hard-earned wisdom?but the hard glint in his eyes suggests he doesn't reach out to smart-ass college kids very often, so this one would do well to appreciate the gesture. (Durning's voice is one of the most distinctive sounds in the past 30 years of American movies; close your eyes and you can hear it.)

Robert Forster is even better. As Joe, the dark-haired old sailor who bunks with Dale, he gets the only obvious spotlight monologues in the picture, and he interprets them in an astoundingly fluid, natural, realistic way. I kept waiting for him to do something false with his face or voice and it never happened. He is the dictionary definition of Mamet's ideal actor: one who invents nothing, preferring instead to say the line and let the audience decide how to feel.

You've seen Forster in a million movies, including 1969's Medium Cool. Yet his performance in Lakeboat feels like a career-making debut; he lets you discover, or rediscover, everything that's great about him. An extraordinary moment finds him confessing to Dale that when he was a kid, he always dreamed about being a ballet dancer. He's well aware of how gay that sounds, so you know he must really trust the kid. An earlier, even more touching scene has Joe insisting, in his relaxed, unfussy, thoroughly man's-man way, that Dale has got it made?not because Dale's a college kid, necessarily, or because he's smart, though he is, but simply because he's young and he's got his whole life ahead of him. It's a profound admission?all the more so because Joe doesn't seem to know his words have weight.

The bedrock strength of Forster's performance makes Joe the pivot of the narrative, and effectively reorients what might have been a coming-of-age story so that it becomes a meditation on age and mortality instead. Mantegna honors Forster?and by extension, the other veterans in his cast?by giving Joe the final shot of the movie. Most coming-of-age tales end with a closeup of the questing young man saying goodbye to the people who knew him briefly yet changed his life. With counterintuitive originality, Lakeboat lets Dale get into his mother's car in long shot, as seen from the deck of the docked vessel; Joe is in the foreground with his back turned.

Implication: Joe never really got to know the kid and the kid never really got to know Joe, yet they both meant something to each other. And it's very likely that Dale meant more to Joe than the other way around. There's a touch of unrequited love (or at least affection) in their friendship. Is Joe one of those World War II-era blue-collar macho men who always suspected he was gay but could never imagine admitting it to himself, much less the world? Or is Joe simply a man in love with an ideal?the ideal of youthful promise? Lakeboat leaves these questions, and others, unanswered?which is always more resonant than sewing everything up into a phony little uplifting package.

Three years ago, Forster wrangled a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination, for his work in Jackie Brown. His work in Lakeboat is even finer?a career summation. This is a tiny film from a tiny distributor, but I hope they've got enough money lying around to promote Forster next fall as an awards contender. To see this performance is to want it honored.