MOVIE REVIEW : Mamet’s ‘Oleanna’ More of a Tirade Than a Debate

David Mamet’s “Oleanna,” adapted from his two-character play, is about sexual harassment, but it’s the audience for this movie that gets harassed. Mamet must mean for this movie to be as enjoyable as fingernails scraping a blackboard. For both men and women, watching it is intended as an act of penance for all our sexist, elitist, feminist, patriarchal ills.

But, for all his rigorous finger-pointing, Mamet may have misfired. Partly because of casting, partly because of what’s in the play itself, “Oleanna” ends up as a tirade against feminist PC cruelties.

John (William H. Macy) is a prominent liberal arts college professor who is on the verge of achieving tenure--and a new home for his family. Carol (Debra Eisenstadt) has received a failing grade from him--it’s never clear what exactly he’s teaching. In a series of self-contained scenes, Carol challenges the smug, smarty-pants academic to explain himself, accusing him of sexual harassment after their first meeting and jeopardizing his tenure.

As the power roles slowly reverse, John’s smugness turns beseeching while Carol’s fury turns smug. It’s clear that, on some essential level, they both relish drawing blood from each other. It’s also clear that we’re not meant to take either John or Carol as full-bodied human beings. They’re archetypes, placards, mouthpieces.

Except that Carol’s mouthpiece seems more shrill and hysterical than John’s. Is this because we’re meant to take her cruelty as retribution for all the ills perpetrated by the patriarchy? But then her charges of sexual harassment--and an even bigger bombshell--are obviously invented. In order for us to sympathize with Carol’s destruction of John’s career, we have to connect to some larger rage in her--a rage he fomented. Mamet seems to think that if we buy the archetype, we’ll buy the person.

But “Oleanna,” at least on film, never makes it to the archetypal stage. The actors are too in-your-face for that. And Carol isn’t someone you want in your face. She may look like the epitome of the agitating, aggravating student, just as John resembles the epitome of self-impressed academia. But her insistent yammer, cadenced in Mametspeak, is enough to drive you out of the theater. (At the screening I attended, the drive up the aisle was bustling.) If Mamet was trying to give equal weight to Carol and John--to the male and female psyche--then he didn’t study his movie-in-progress carefully enough.

*

Not that John comes across as Gandhi. He loves power--a big no-no in powerful PC circles--and it’s clear that a large measure of his capitulation to Carol comes from plain old convenience. He’ll do the Liberated thing if she’ll withdraw her charges before the tenure board. He may be less grating than Carol, and less unfair in his charges, but he’s not someone you want to be bunkered with either.

Mamet may interpret the audience’s hostility to “Oleanna” as a sign he’s touched a nerve. But I wonder. You don’t see this many walk-outs at Strindberg or Ibsen--two guys who knew a few things about dramatizing male-female hand-to-hand combat. Could it be that people turn off to “Oleanna” because it’s as self-righteously phony and baselessly provocative as its characters?

* MPAA rating: Unrated. Times guidelines: It includes a fight in which someone is cut by glass and pummeled.

‘Oleanna’

William H. Macy: John

Debra Eisenstadt: Carol

A Samuel Goldwyn Company in association with Channel Four Films presentation of a Bay Kinescope production. Director David Mamet. Producers Patricia Wolff and Sarah Green. Screenplay by David Mamet, based on his play. Cinematographer Andrezej Sekula. Editor Barbara Tulliver. Costumes Jane Greenwood. Music Rebecca Pidgeon. Production designers David Wasco and Sandy Reynolds Wasco. Set decorator Kate Conklin. Running time: 1 hour, 41 minutes.

* In limited release in Southern California.