David Mamet Is <i> Not</i> Like Everybody Else : Director Offers No Apologies for ‘Homicide’s’ Jewish View

“Ah, c’mon. For God’s sake, just a second, c’mon. Be like me.”

An hour into a luncheon with playwright-turned-filmmaker David Mamet, the brush-cut Chicago Jew cuts to the chase: Being Jewish in America is to constantly be asked to give it up, to--for God’s sake--be like everybody else.

“It’s often very subtle, but it’s also very troubling,” said Mamet, here for the first time at the Cannes Film Festival to discuss his new movie, “Homicide,” which opened the 11-day event Thursday night.

“That’s the problem Jewish people in America have all the time,” Mamet said, during a post-screening luncheon at the posh Grand Hotel du Cap, which ironically served as the headquarters for the Nazi high command during World War II. “The idea is almost a plea from Christians: ‘Be like us, please. Just pretend that being Jewish is just like being Christian.’ ”

The “Ah c’mon” scene in “Homicide” occurs when the partner of the lead character, a Jewish New York cop played by Joe Mantegna, tries to persuade him that the bust of a black drug dealer is more important than the case he’s working on about an elderly Jewish woman shot to death in her candy store in the ghetto.

The movie, which got a standing ovation at a full-house screening held during a driving rainstorm here, essentially takes the form of a buddy-cop movie, but with deep, Mamet-styled theatrical undertones.

Mantegna, who starred in Mamet’s two previous films--”House of Games” and “Things Change”--plays Bobby Gold, a street-wise detective with a gift for communicating with street people. When an FBI bust of a drug deal goes bad, the embarrassed mayor of New York manages to elbow the Feds out of the way and pressures his own police force to solve the crime. Gold, after getting a dressing-down from a black superior who calls him a “kike,” is about to solve the drug case when he happens onto the murder of the candy store owner.

There are two movies here. The first is a conventional fast-paced cop drama, an episode of “Starsky and Hutch” that pays attention to detail. The second is a probing psychological drama about a man questioning his own ethnicity and his own values.

The two tones are going to make “Homicide” a tough sale for the mass audience, but Mamet doesn’t care about that--not even if you say, “Ah c’mon, David, just pretend you make movies like everybody else.”

“I don’t make movies to make money,” said Mamet, whose play “Speed-the-Plow” stands as one of the most cynical things ever written about deal-making in Hollywood. “I know that sounds self-serving, but it’s the only defense I can make. I write movies to make money but I don’t make them for that reason.”

Mamet said he’s often been asked by major studios to consider projects for them, for fees that might double the $15 million he said all three of his films together have cost. But the temptation has been avoidable. “The Greeks say avoid temptation for fear of not being strong enough to resist it,” he said. “So I avoid it.”

Mamet, like many storytellers with roots in the theater, punctuates his conversation with quotes, aphorisms and old bromides, sometimes searching for the origin: “What’s the old joke? If a man’s too poor or too rich to eat lox, when does he eat it?” In any event, he brings a refreshing earnestness to this often pretentious, mostly ditzy international gathering of film nerds, filmmakers, hustlers and bare-breasted bathers.

Mamet, so new to the scene that he actually rode to the press luncheon on the press bus, seemed a little taken aback by the debate his film prompted among American Jews here. There was the Joe Mantegna “problem.” Though his performance was unanimously praised, it was also near unanimous that the Italian-American actor doesn’t cut muster as a New York Jew, at least not one who would risk his entire career by getting involved with a Jewish underground sabotaging neo-Nazis.

Mamet disagreed that Mantegna doesn’t seem “Jewish enough,” and said he never thought of anyone else for the role. “I’ll make all my movies with Joe if I can,” he said.

In the film, which is scheduled to open in the United States this fall, Mantegna’s character is a one-of-the-boys cop who tosses out racial epithets as often as he catches them. Only when he gets into the candy store case, and is taunted by the old woman’s relatives, does he begin questioning his own identity.

Mamet said the idea for the movie was inspired only by his own Jewishness, and that he didn’t have anything in mind other than to tell a good story about the subtle racism that invades Jews’ lives in America.

He said he tried to sell the idea to major studios, but ultimately got it made with independent producer Ed Pressman.

“I am very upfront with everyone I talk to (about a movie),” he said. “I show them a script and tell them how much it will cost. If they say yes, I say ‘Thanks, I’ll see you at the opening.’ The trade-off of that is you can’t bitch if they don’t distribute the film. I think that’s as fair a deal as you can make.”