Detec­tive Bobby Gold (Joe Man­tegna) comes to see him­self as torn between two dis­crete worlds in David Mamet’s Homi­cide (1991). Only when maneu­vered into a posi­tion in which he must choose, the dual­ity unrav­els and he finds he is no one spe­cial and belongs nowhere in particular.

Gold’s part­ner Sul­li­van (William H. Macy) has an unre­served man-crush on him, tak­ing every oppor­tu­nity to pub­licly but­ter him up and extol the ther­a­peu­tic plea­sures of police work. He reminds their peers that his revered part­ner is “Bobby The Ora­tor,” so-called for his skill at nego­ti­a­tion. Indeed the moniker is deserv­ing, for he is called on to calm a rabid dog with mere words, and later sweet-talk a fero­ciously stub­born mother into betray­ing her son. But Gold is cer­tainly no action hero, con­firmed in a early scene as he is beaten up and dis­armed by an over­weight civil­ian, in the sanc­tu­ary of the police sta­tion. By the end of the film, he has lost his sidearm a sec­ond time and is quickly phys­i­cally bested again by the crook Ran­dolph (Ving Rhames). Is it too much of a stretch to link his fail­ure to con­trol his weapon with impo­tence and cas­tra­tion? He cer­tainly feels per­pet­u­ally aggrieved. At each unfair turn in these very unfair events, he repeats his refrain: “What did I ever do to you?”

“You got some heavy trou­bles on your mind? Huh, babe? We’ll work it out. We’ll play some cops and rob­bers. We’ll bust this big crim­i­nal. We’ll swag­ger around.”

Bobby acci­den­tally comes across a seem­ingly mun­dane mur­der while chas­ing down the sex­ier Ran­dolph case (the kind of unam­bigu­ous, action-packed police work, with mea­sur­able results, that grants Gold and Sul­li­van exis­ten­tial sat­is­fac­tion). Elderly Jew­ish woman Mrs. Klein has been found mur­dered in her inner-city candy shop. Every­thing points to a sim­ple rob­bery, “every­thing” being, of course, the sup­po­si­tion that poor neigh­bor­hood African Amer­i­cans have robbed a rare white busi­ness. Klein’s son, not quite griev­ing but resigned to a life­time of per­se­cu­tion, sighs “It never ends.” When Bobby asks “What never ends?”, grand­daugh­ter (Rebecca Pigeon) coldly clar­i­fies for him: “On the jews.” Already the mur­der esca­lates from a rob­bery to a hate crime, and this is a strong whiff of cat­nip for a man who also believes him­self to be per­pet­u­ally put-upon and aggrieved. As the Klein fam­ily cor­rectly infers, Bobby is a Jew. But he wears a 5-point star as a cop. His sub­li­mated Jew­ish pride only comes out in defense against the occa­sional pro­fes­sional flare-up in which he is called a “kike.”

Fit­tingly for a detec­tive cel­e­brated for a mas­tery of words, pur­su­ing the Klein mur­der case is more an act of lit­er­ary schol­ar­ship than one of police pro­ce­dure. Gold’s inves­ti­ga­tion brings him to a Jew­ish research library where he senses deeper mys­ter­ies encoded in his ances­tral Yid­dish. His sin­gle best clue is the tan­ta­liz­ing deriva­tion of the nonsense-seeming word “Gro­fatz.” All of this leads him into a con­fronta­tion with a decades-old group of Zion­ist war­riors (who may be or may not be the Mossad, although the name is not men­tioned in the film) who awaken him to his venge­ful Jew­ish iden­tity. Hun­gry for the rush of pos­i­tive action that his cop side is cur­rently deny­ing him, he elbows his way into their ranks and becomes addicted to vio­lent action.

“Hey, you’re bet­ter than an aquar­ium, you know that? There’s some­thing hap­pen­ing with you every minute.”

But Homi­cide is a policier on the sur­face only. Like most of Mamet’s plays and screen­plays, the plot is struc­tured around a deep, com­plex con­fi­dence game. House of Games, The Span­ish Pris­oner, Glen­garry Glen Ross (read The Dork Report review), Spar­tan, and Red­belt (read The Dork Report review) all fea­ture a long con of one form or another at their cores. A sucker is a sucker because of the tru­ism that if one looks hard enough for some­thing, one will find it. Most of Gold’s appar­ent clues and leads evap­o­rate into mean­ing­less hap­pen­stance. What is at stake is not what he thinks, and he finds him­self used and abandoned.

Spe­cial men­tion goes to fine cin­e­matog­ra­phy by the great Roger Deakins. The decay­ing Bal­ti­more pro­vides for two spec­tac­u­lar chase scenes, one along the rooftops and another below the asphalt. Each coils into a labyrinth, spi­ral­ing down and in, deeper and deeper, until Bobby encoun­ters phys­i­cally pow­er­less but immov­able minotaur-like fig­ures the dis­armed man must bat­tle with his words alone.

Must read: Homi­cide: What Are You, Then? by Stu­art Klawans

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.