MOVIE REVIEW : A Tough Cop Closes In on Himself in ‘Homicide’

Don’t be fooled by his fascination with cops, the delight he takes in their tough talk and existential ways, even the fact that he has called his newest picture “Homicide.” David Mamet doesn’t have crime on his mind. Not really.

Rather, as a writer-director he has appropriated the trappings of a police procedural to make a remarkably personal film about identity, loyalty, paranoia and anti-Semitism. Even though it ends up falling off the tracks--maybe even because it falls off the tracks--”Homicide” (at the UA Glasshouse and Mann’s Grove) absolutely holds your interest with the passion that powerfully felt but screwy efforts often have.

“Homicide” opens with a chilling, wordless scene of a heavily armed group of hooded men practically tiptoeing up a staircase, blowing open a door and then storming in and shooting everything that moves. After the smoke clears, it turns out that we have been watching an unsuccessful FBI attempt to arrest a drug dealer whose ability to elude capture is turning him into a hero in the black community.

The mayor of this unnamed city (which feels a lot like New York) is furious, and leans on the local police force to bring the culprit in, alive. A pair of detectives, Bobby Gold (Joe Mantegna) and Tim Sullivan (William H. Macy), think they have the contacts to get the job done, but before that can happen, fate, in the form of an old Jewish woman murdered in her inner-city store, intervenes.

Partly by accident, and partly because the woman’s son is “heavy downtown” and insists on him, Bobby Gold ends up getting pulled off the glamorous FBI case and working the ghetto murder. “I’m stuck here,” he fumes on the phone to his partner, “with my Jews.” Not only does the case appear petty in comparison to what might have been, but the woman’s family seems to be irrationally insisting that her murder was part of some bizarre anti-Jewish conspiracy.

Though he can’t quite give up on the chance to one-up the FBI, Gold finds himself getting increasingly obsessed with the Jewish case. A cop’s cop, the first one in the door during even the most dangerous of raids, he has been hooked on the drug of police work to the apparent exclusion of everything else in his life. Though anti-Semitic taunts infuriate him, he has clearly never thought of himself as particularly Jewish.

If on the surface the narrative drive of “Homicide” (rated R for language and violence) intertwines the solving of these two criminal cases, Bobby’s most potent investigations turn out to be more internal than external, closer to a consciousness-raising session than to traditional police work. He embarks on a fascinating quest, of a type almost never seen on film, in search of personal and cultural identity, trying to decide what it means to be a cop, what it means to be a Jew, and whether it is possible to be loyal to both masters.

Because Bobby has to be convincing both probing his soul and rousting criminals, the role is a difficult one, and Joe Mantegna, who has starred in both of Mamet’s previous films and more or less functions as the writer’s alter ego, handles it all with aplomb. While in other hands Bobby’s dilemma might be too self-referential to be of general interest, Mantegna has the presence and the forcefulness to bring it alive.

He is helped in this by Mamet’s singular dialogue. Wised-up, staccato and often bracingly pungent (“The FBI couldn’t find Joe Louis in a bowl of rice,” one cop snaps), it had a tendency, in Mamet’s first two films, “House of Games” and “Things Change,” to seem excessively stylized and stage-bound, a relic from the days when he worked exclusively in the theater. Here, however, the dialogue plays much more realistically, and greatly increases the film’s considerable emotional charge.

Also improved is Mamet’s skill as a director, his facility with the pure mechanics of movie-making, his ability to find ways to tell stories effectively. In fact, “Homicide” is a model of tightly coiled tension, with so much urban claustrophobia and hostility squeezed into it that the film’s very frames seem about to explode.

Given all that, it is a pity that by the end of “Homicide” the feeling is inescapable that there is less here than meets the eye. Like a juggler who can’t keep all his balls up in the air indefinitely, Mamet by the close falls into serious implausibilities and inconsistencies that even his impressive display of style cannot totally camouflage. Still, it’s a thrilling ride while it lasts, and it marks Mamet’s true emergence as a writer-director to be reckoned with.