TAORMINA FILM FESTIVAL 2025 REVIEW! David Mamet might be the most celebrated living playwright in America. Holder of the Pulitzer prize since 1984 and the man behind the scripts for The Untouchables and The Verdict. His best writing is as driving and satisfying as it gets.
When it comes to directing, though, his hit rate behind the camera is not that of his penmanship. His most prominent pictures as director, House of Games and Redbelt, while great dramas, barely caused a ripple with audiences or awards. That’s all fine, better a master of one trade than a jack of all. Although his book On Directing is so very brilliant on the topic of montage it is frustrating that he hasn’t had more success on screen with the principles he evidently knows so well.
Mamet’s latest film as writer/director, the drama Henry Johnson, stars Evan Jonigkeit as a young man who gets swallowed whole by the prison system. Henry is introduced to us in a classic piece of Mamet, being ushered into the office of senior lawyer Barnes (a wonderful Chris Bauer) to discuss Johnson’s request for a friend to take a job at the firm. This scene works on pretty much every level and is an exemplar of how good Mamet’s writing and directing can be. At the scene’s end, our understanding of what we are seeing is brilliantly flipped.
Sadly, this may have been the best part of the film. From here on, Mamet’s greatest strengths in plotting — a kind of persistent fan dance between the story and the audience — become millstones on the audience’s attention.
This is despite Shia LaBeouf making his appearance as Gene, a worryingly intelligent cellmate to the now-incarcerated Johnson. While LaBeouf has presence galore and delivers his lines well, the arid intellectualising that can be so amusing when bantered around between bloodthirsty salesmen becomes tricky to digest from a random cellmate in prison.
“…a young man who gets swallowed whole by the prison system.”
There is also a peculiar lack of fear from Henry, who, despite Gene’s potential danger, nonetheless addresses him with the aloofness of a Karen dealing with a bad food order. It just didn’t work. The drama got sucked out of the room, and there was a verbosity to things that just seemed to muddle the narrative.
This problem persists into the following scene, where a prison guard (Dominic Hoffman) rambles on at such length about events so removed from the audience that we don’t know why he is even mentioning them.
Still, the dialogue throughout Henry Johnson is good. Gene’s assessment of the prison population, “a bunch of fools not smart enough to escape the broken nets of the law,” is as elegant as it is barbed and timely, and the event which leads to all this woe, a wicked, illegal abortion, seems to hang over the piece like one of Dickens’s ghosts. Mamet is famously conservative, and I watched this the day after the United Kingdom’s House of Commons voted in favor of profoundly shocking abortion laws. This seemed to confirm the feeling that the script had an open goal on a hot-button topic, but didn’t quite know what to make of it.
The closest film of Mamet’s that I could compare Henry Johnson to is Oleanna, which shares the same pared-down style and is similarly directed by Mamet from one of his own plays. But where that script gets it hooks in the audience immediately and doesn’t let go, this spent too much time being hard to figure, or just having a hard time figuring itself out, in much the same way perhaps that Henry has to continually re-assess himself throughout.
It’s an entertaining piece, and Mamet’s direction is lean and strong, the blocking and montage exquisite. The story does resonate, too, but overall it lacks the superstar qualities of Mamet’s best work.
Henry Johnson screened at the 2025 Taormina Film Festival.
"…Mamet's direction is lean and strong, the blocking and montage exquisite."
