State and Main
Go, you Huskies!
It's not a lie... it's a gift for fiction.
For all of his foibles, Mamet can write dialogue like no one else, and the chance to hear his words in the trappings of a sort of proto-Hail, Caesar! — a film about filmmaking — is too good an opportunity to pass up.
This movie is cynical and odd. It contains a bunch of great writing, delivered by horrible people, portrayed by actors you are excited to see; the net effect is a film that you feel slightly more rotten for having seen.
And yet: the best deconstructions are also love letters. Mamet names the mayor of this town — which could essentially be Bedford Falls — George Bailey. He also quickly dispenses with the traditional narrative (a large capitalist entity rolling over and squashing small-town people with big hearts) by laboring to show us how strange and urbane and awful the townspeople are, too.
Almost everyone is terrific in this, in all senses of the word, and in ways that feel just self-referential enough to suggest recursion. Alec Baldwin's main plot arc is his inability to not sleep with underage girls; the girl in question (Julia Stiles) is written as a pursuer rather than a victim. Rebecca Pidgeon steals the show as a sort of saintly manic pixie dream girl who also incites much of the plot by leaving her fiancé on a whim.
It is also — lest any of this obscure the point — an intensely frenetic and funny movie.