Welcome to “The Art of the Score,” a monthly Vague Visages column about the best heist movies ever made. Be warned — there will be spoilers. The first film we’re casing is, perhaps appropriately, David Mamet’s intricate and effortless Heist from 2001.
Joe Moore (the master Gene Hackman) is a veteran thief with a loyal, tight-knit crew including Bobby “Bob” Blane (the calm and assertive Delroy Lindo), Don “Pinky” Pincus (the superb Ricky Jay — RIP) and Joe’s wife, Fran (the enigmatic and beautiful Rebecca Pidgeon). Their financier Mickey Bergman (the powder keg antagonist Danny DeVito) withholds their cut from a score to push the crew into their biggest heist yet, robbing a bullion stash on an international cargo flight. Joe begrudgingly agrees to terms if he controls how it goes down. Mickey pushes his nephew Jimmy Silk (Sam Rockwell) to tag along as an apprenticeship (another thinly-veiled attempt at control). As the interference heats up, Joe delays the score for a month to deliver the goods. Once they take the plane down, Mickey attempts to double-cross while Joe and the crew continue to implement failsafe after failsafe to escape.
Critically, Heist received mixed reviews. Those who it didn’t resonate with cited Mamet’s repetitious regurgitation, while the great Roger Ebert said that Heist is “the kind of caper movie that was made before special effects replaced wit, construction and intelligence. This movie is made out of fresh ingredients, not cake mix. Despite the twists of its plot, it is about its characters.” Financially, the reception of Heist suffered from the air travel industry revolution and fortification that coincided with the looming cloud of 9/11. The film’s central heist requires the crew to manipulate and extort a vulnerable airport security officer to infiltrate the runway and hijack a plane — grounding it for the theft. The team also deploys a runway side explosion as misdirection for their misdeeds. Heist earned $28 million on a budget of $39 million. Only a decade earlier, Goodfellas explored the concept of the airport as a criminal buffet, and garnered a $46 million haul.
In recent years, whenever there’s a mention of Heist, those who hear it get a fond glint in their eye, and those recollections expeditiously result in Mamet’s film barging to the top of the rewatch list. Jason Bailey’s 2016 reappraisal of Heist rightly showcases the “stellar ensemble cast, sharp direction, and a script with more quotable dialogue than a year of studio pictures.”
THESE CREWS ARE GOOD
As a director, Mamet creates certain conditions with his writing and lean, muscular filmmaking expression that requires a high level of aptitude from his players to embrace and elevate it. The very best Mamet written films — The Untouchables, Glengarry Glen Ross and Wag the Dog — adopt a language of constant conflict. The performers are like boxers getting busy with activity. The films requires players who embrace the flurry of movement, parrying and footwork to navigate through plot and dance around generic conventions. There’s a game quality in all the actors and actresses. Heist creates both a remarkable cohesion and enrapturing friction between this assembly of crooks.
Joe is a singular creation. There’s only one Hackman, after all. The actor infuses Joe with this fast-twitch emotionality, especially in front of those people outside of his crew. He shows a man out of control, reacting rather than responding. Joe seems slower, weaker and more pliable to people he’s attempting to coerce for gains along the way. In the intimate moments, alone or with his crew, he’s controlled, deliberate, wily and damned ingenious.
DeVito’s Mickey Bergman, the sponsor and facilitator of scores performed by Joe and his crew, is a gleefully antagonistic prick. The diminutive ballbuster has grown entitled in the relationship with the crew’s aptitude, efficiency and modesty. As Heist begins, Mickey compels them into this new job, with new parameters and new deals. DeVito has charm and an X-ray vision for an angle.
Ricky Jay — may he rest in peace — is like water in Heist. Â Don “Pinky” Pincus has that quality of a brilliant waiter or concierge — innate anticipation for what’s required in any given moment and absolutely no hesitation to put himself in harm’s way to satisfy. When reflecting on Jay’s career, I believe that Pinky may be the best convergence of a real-life hustler turned into a effortless criminal.
Pidgeon’s Fran Moore is so utterly implacable in Heist. It’s hard to see where the score ends and where Fran begins throughout the film. She is alluring, tactically flirtatious and constantly keeping different marks distracted with her body and innate ability to feel like she’s generating all those precisely right things to say at any given moment. Fran’s charms enamor someone like Jimmy but test the patience of Bergman, who can smell being played like a gas leak. After all, Joe rightly says, “she could talk her way out of a sunburn.”
Rockwell’s Jimmy Silk is a delight in self-confidence and willful ignorance. He consistently evaluates Joe and his crew, and believes that he should be the successor for the criminal side of his cantankerous uncle’s business. Silk is the flashy and casual poker player that waltzes to a table of straight degenerate sharks, wading into situation after situation where he sets himself up for a mauling.
PLAN A
Heist is that rare gem where the crew doesn’t need the money. They know the potential land mines of Bergman’s interference, and use them as the inspiration for Joe’s most divinely-crafted score yet. One of the truly magical qualities of Heist is that Mamet’s intricately plotted and deliberate misdirection makes it hard, even after many viewings, to track the sleight of hand. It isn’t just in the heist itself, nor is it in the casing of the theft, but instead in every decision made from the moment that Joe begrudgingly accepts the assignment. It’s not just getting to the airport, stopping the plane, creating diversions; it’s returning to the scene, faking one part of a getaway, collecting the goods, leaving people hanging.
Mamet’s most significant thematic concern is control — how power and funding creates a sense of entitlement. In some ways, it could be a read as the director’s allegorical, autobiographical tale of his filmmaking experiences. He’s Joe, the man modestly delivering these reliable scores for increasingly controlling financiers, whose demands must be circumvented to make it out in front, and alive.
PLAN B, C, D AND WHATEVER ELSE
Heist isn’t simply about acquiring the score, which is delightfully executed; it’s about how different layers of the operation have been segmented in levels of “need-to-know.
The long game is also incredible in Heist. Mamet uses characters to probe for the weaknesses in the people of authority at the locations of scores; those around the mechanisms of the escape orchestrate chaos, and controlling business partners try to clock their every move, let alone any heat around the corner. This isn’t unusual in the genre, however it’s the authenticity of the misdirection that elevates long game concepts in Heist. In Ocean’s Eleven, Steven Soderbergh uses this device to plant crew members in situations to be exploited at opportune moments during the heist.
Patti LuPone does such outstanding work by grounding airport officer Betty Croft in Heist. The character is a functioning alcoholic, struggling to make ends meet after a divorce. Fran baits Betty into an encounter with Joe impersonating an FAA officer that signals her compliance on the day of the heist. Mamet is mercurial in constructing a deeply-relatable quandary for Betty, and Joe’s performance drips with authentic guilt.
DOUBLE CROSSES
From the first moment Jimmy Silk appears on screen in Heist, it’s apparent that he’s there to plagiarise Joe’s tradecraft and to sabotage their getaway. Joe’s crew imitates discord and doubt, and seemingly sinks to the level where the score is beyond them. When one acknowledges Jimmy’s presence, it casts everything in doubt. When Rockwell’s character is going to be alone with the temptation to attack/disrupt Joe’s tradecraft, it’s accounted for. Like Mamet’s script, Joe’s masterpiece of a score knows the characters well enough to account for their weaknesses.
The final moments of Heist reveal the final double-cross. Time after time, Joe slips through Mickey Bergman’s clutches. This last encounter brings Fran and Jimmy Silk to the last refuge and deployment point with the score, the gold bullion disguised as long pipes. Jimmy once again feels like he’s taken control of the encounter, and Fran (rather than those times of being in on the attempted double-cross) ambivalently accepts her fate by betraying Joe — or so it seems. I have watched this moment countless times, and to this day, I can never know if what I’m seeing is a cold betrayal or a devout crew member maintaining the ruse to play the long game.
NEVER GOING BACK
The best Heist moment comes during the final scene. Lindo’s Bobby returns to his car after a post-job debrief with Joe. As Hackman’s character talks about the eventual take from the score coming to him once he’s settled, Bobby reassures him that he knows he’s good for it. Their relationship at this moment could not be more assured. Every dramatic scene surrounding the heist up until this point has been a performance. This fleeting encounter is the most authentic moment of the entire film. They each lament the fate of Pinky before Bobby walks out of the street-side diner and back into his car with his wife. She innocently asks about Hackman’s character, to which Bobby replies: “Ahh, some guy who wanted me to give him a tip on a fight.” Bobby’s wife replies, “Did you?” Lindo’s character responds, “I told him I work my whole life. Why should I give him the benefit of a lifetime of knowledge? Drive.”
Bobby has learned a double life, one that reinforces success, efficiency and longevity in the business. Family and work don’t mix. Pinky’s overt interactions with his family have made them an apparent target. Joe’s relationship with Fran includes the con, and therefore may leave audiences scratching their heads at the length of that specific element of the scam. On the other hand, Bobby walks back out to his car and meets his wife, which is a big reveal. Viewers can assume, I suppose, that Joe knows Bobby has a wife, which results in an elaborate performance.
Lindo’s role in Heist demonstrates Mamet’s antithetical and oppositional views on method acting. In the director’s 1997 book True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor, he writes that “It’s the job of the actor to show up, and use the lines and his or her will and common sense, to attempt to achieve a goal similar to that of the protagonist. And that is the end of the actor’s job.” In Heist, Bobby is an equal to Joe in every way (a sign of Lindo’s brilliant acting), and the goodbye scene is heartbreaking. In a single gaze, Bobby reveals the depths of his affection for his friend. Just as Ben Affleck’s Chuckie begs Matt Damon’s Will not to stay home in Good Will Hunting, Lindo’s character tells Joe never to come back. The line is delivered with a sense of calmness and composure, and nonetheless, it’s devastating. When Bobby enters that car, with coffee in hand and a newspaper, in the same wardrobe, he’s unrecognisable. Bobby has made his escape from that life.
Such is the profound artistry of Heist — what is life but a getaway.
Blake Howard (@OneBlakeMinute) is a writer, Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic and the Australian Podcast Award-nominated host and producer behind One Heat Minute.
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