A truly great film that just gets better with age.

In today's movie making world, audiences worldwide get blasted by so many blockbusters boasting tons of CGI effects and whiz-bang f/x that it sometimes becomes easy to forget the joys of movies where the focus is just on characters talking.

I recently received the 2-disc 10th anniversary DVD of the 1992 film Glengarry Glen Ross as part of my Christmas gifts this year. I haven't seen the film in quite a few years but I what I did remember was it being a memorable film containing one of the best ensembles of actors that I had ever seen assembled for a film. After viewing the movie again in it's original widescreen splendor, I can only say that this movie has only gotten better with time. Most people wouldn't think that a film dealing with real estate agents doing basically nothing but talking could make for electrifying cinema. But believe me, this film crackles with more energy and brilliant acting than you're bound to find in almost any other film.

The plot concerns a group of down-on-their luck real estate agents working for a company called Mitch & Murray who are told one day by an outside consultant named Blake (a delightfully livid Alec Baldwin) hired by Mitch & Murray (who gives them a brutal, borderline abusive and extremely profane "pep talk") that a new 1 week sales contest is going to begin. 1st prize is a Cadillac El Dorado. 2nd prize is a collection of steak knives. 3rd prize is "you're fired". It seems that practically all of the agents (with the possible exception of one) have been in an ongoing sales slump and their employer has grown very impatient with them. The agents feel that they are given really poor "leads" (which are basically cards that people send in stating that they're interested in buying real-estate in a particular region). The icing on the cake is that if they end up closing some deals, they will also get access to some premium leads called the "Glengarry leads" which are some very lucrative clients who have all the money in the world to buy substancial real estate. The agents' boss who runs this particular office named John Williamson (played perfectly by a then unknown Kevin Spacey) locks the Glengarry leads in his office in a file cabinet so that no one will be able to get to them before they close an appropriate amount of deals.

The agents consist of an interesting collection of personalities (and brilliant actors). We first meet Shelley Levene (Jack Lemmon) who is having some truly tough times. Once referred to as "The Machine" when he was in his selling prime, he is now a washed up old man who is viewed as a has-been by most of his peers. His wife is in the hospital and he's really in dire straights financially.

Richard "Ricky" Roma (Al Pacino) is the cocky one of the group. He has actually had a good month so far and the rest of the men are extremely upset that he wasn't required to be at the meeting where they got absolutely blasted verbally by Blake. We first meet him at the local bar across the street from their office where he ends up meeting a man by the name of James Lingk (Jonathan Pryce) who is a married man that might be secretly gay. Ricky senses this possible latent homosexuality and plays persuasively into that direction to get Lingk to buy some real estate.

Dave Moss (Ed Harris) likes to complain a whole lot and blame all of his problems on people and situations around him. He tries to act all tough and bossy, particularly around fellow agent George Aaronow (Alan Arkin) who is slow, kind of dim-witted, easily swayed and at the bottom rung of the ladder sales wise. Dave is furious about them being given only 1 week to save their jobs and the fact that their office boss John won't go ahead and give them the lucrative Glengarry leads. He wants them now and doesn't want to actually have to work for them.

Essentially, all of these men are under a great deal of pressure, particularly Dave, George and Shelley. I don't want to give too much of the plot away, but something occurs regarding the Glengarry leads that causes a ton of turmoil between the agents and their boss at a crucial point in the film.

But in reality, this movie isn't about their sales plights as it is about how men treat and talk to each other when it's just "the guys". And talk they most certainly do. I've never seen a film in which just dialogue can effectively propel a film as it does in this movie.
But that is due to famed play and screenwriter David Mamet who actually adapted his own play of the same name for this film. Most of the central activity takes place in the office with the actors just laying into each other and scheming but it never gets boring since the dialogue is so good and this cast is to talented (and having an apparent blast).

The direction in this film is quite good considering that it is in a lot of ways a filmed play. But director James Foley brings just the right cinematic touch to the film to keep it from feeling liked it is just a play transferred to film. He knows how to use close-ups to punctuate scenes in which just a single reaction shot of a character to what someone else has said can speak volumes.

In a cast of nothing but standouts, I was particularly blown away by Jack Lemmon's finely tuned and nuanced performance. It is really sad that he is no longer with us as he was always one of my favorite actors and this film proves why. He knows that you can say a ton with just a glance or a pause between a couple of lines than any amount of overacting couldn't try to get across properly and effectively. There are some scenes in the film that are truly heartbreaking as we watch him trying to come to terms with the fact that he has completely lost his sales touch and he just needs to move on somehow. A truly magnificent performance that just gets better and reveals more with each subsequent viewing.

While Alec Baldwin is only in a few moments of the film near the beginning, his character Blake is truly a force of nature. I've never been that big a fan of Alec Baldwin (or the Baldwin Brothers in general), but he really pulls out the stops with his performance and like everyone else in the cast is just purely having a ball saying his great lines. Even though it's a comparatively small role, he makes the most of it and actually manages to cast an appropriate shadow over the rest of the film. Jonathan Pryce's character doesn't really come into significant play until about halfway through, but the British actor has a wonderful scene with Al Pacino near the end that is one of his best performances to date.

Ed Harris, one of the most dependable actors in Hollywood, turns in a career defining performance. Alan Arkin had the least to work with character wise, but he takes what he was given and has some truly great scenes particularly near the end. Al Pacino is great as usual and he finds a nice balance between some of his quieter movie performances and some of the louder more verbose ones that he sometimes gets criticized for. Kevin Spacey's character really starts to grow as the movie goes along and there's a sequence between him and Jack Lemmon near the end that should go down as one of the truly great sequences in movie history.

The movie also is flawlessly edited and the running time comes in at a taut and efficient 100 minutes.

I really can't say anything bad about this movie. It is truly one of my personal favorites and is one that can be watched over and over again. It is one of those rare movies that actually gets better over time, and thankfully Artisan Entertainment noticed this as well and gave this film the special edition DVD treatment that it deserved.

The recent 2-disc DVD special edition contains the anamorphic widescreen (2.35:1) version on Disc 1 and a horribly cropped and pointless full frame pan/scan version on Disc 2. The extras are split up between the 2 discs, much in the same way that Artisan did with their amazing 2-disc Reservoir Dogs set. The picture quality is flawless in the widescreen version and director James Foley makes great use of the 2.35:1 widescreen frame by sometimes positioning 2 characters doing 2 different things on each side of the frame.

There is a scene specific commentary by the director on the widescreen version on Disc 1 which doesn't go through the whole movie, but mainly during a few key scenes that total 25 minutes. While I would have preferred a full length commentary track, what he does have to say is very interesting and sheds some light on how he approached filming this movie. There's also a similar scene specific commentary track on Disc 2 that features a couple members of the cast, the cinematographer and the production designer. What they have to say is fairly interesting, but you also have to sit through some of the horrible pan/scan version so proceed at your own risk with this track.

There is a moving featurette called Magic Time: A Tribute to Jack Lemmon that covers the late (and great) actor's life and long acting career. It runs about 30 minutes. Next up is a sort of making of featurette called ABC-Always Be Closing titled after one of Blake's sales tips that he has written on a chalk board. It talks with real salesmen as well as the cast about how true the movie tried to be in regards to the changing real estate market during the early 90's. Gets a little tiring but there is some good information presented here in various spots. This also runs for about 30 minutes.

The last is something that I can't quite figure out. It's a short little B/W documentary called J. Roy: New and Used Furniture. I don't really know what the point of it is and if it's supposed to be a sly joke or not. Very odd if I might say so myself.


All in all, I highly recommend this DVD to everybody. It is nice that this great film has finally gotten the proper attention that it deserves in the DVD world and I just love finally having it in its original widescreen format. I've always said that truly great films deserve equally fine DVD's and Artisan did a bang up job here.


Glengarry Glen Ross is rated R and contains extreme language.