Adult dramas get lots of respect but struggle for audiences in a film culture targeted at teens and video-gamers. Genre films films get no respect but lots of ad dollars and, usually, big audiences. When genre films aim for adult sensibilities, they usually wind up with neither. That’s surely what happened with David Mamet’s Redbelt, a classic fight film relocated from the boxing ring to the world of Jiu-jitsu and mixed martial arts with the hero’s journey of a samurai adventure. The film never really got the respect it deserved or the audiences it should have, but it’s pure Mamet. As I wrote in the Seattle P-I: “David Mamet’s stage reputation is built on his glorious dialogue, pushed far beyond any sense of realism into a verbal symphony of intertwining solos built on staccato bursts of profane words elevated to terse poetry. But when it comes to Hollywood, his most interesting films are his genre picture – heist films, murder mysteries, con movies, all generally male-centric narratives that he reworks with his own brand of professional pride, machismo and male honor. It’s a man’s world and he revels in it.”

Redbelt - Learning the moves

It’s glorious pulp fiction elevated to genre art, full of Mamet’s cynicism about the corruption of big business and his romantic ideals of men dedicated to a higher purpose, and defined by Mamet’s trademark dialogue and his distinctive take on the machismo of the fight film genre: the confidence of strength, the courage of modesty, and the professional grace of a fighter who uses the least amount of effort and movement to achieve his goal.

The DVD does the film justice, with featurettes that take the film and its ambitions seriously (the onstage “Q&A with David Mamet” hosted by Kent Jones at a New York screening of the film, is just the thing that Mamet fans will love), and featurettes that delves into the art and culture of Jiu-jitsu and mixed martial arts (just the thing for fight movie fans).

I review DVD in my MSN column here. I also interviewed star Chiwetel Ejiofor for GreenCine.

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I sounds crazy when you say it – David Mamet writes and directs a martial arts drama – but it’s a superb match of sensibility and genre. In so many ways, Redbelt is both a revival and a complete redefinition of the kind of film that Jean-Claude Van Damme cranked out in the eighties, the kind of thriller that pit fighters in matches in underground leagues and our honorable hero overcomes his disdain for such bloodsport to take revenge for the murder of a brother/friend in the ring.

Mamet, of course, latches on to the philosophical grounding of martial arts that is always given lip service in such films, and then either ignored or bent to fit the revenge plots. But he also embraces the machismo of the genre, but in his own way: the confidence of strength, the courage of modesty, and the professional grace of a fighter who uses the least amount of effort and movement to achieve his goal.

I wrote about the film for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer here:

David Mamet’s stage reputation is built on his glorious dialogue, pushed far beyond any sense of realism into a verbal symphony of intertwining solos built on staccato bursts of profane words elevated to terse poetry. But when it comes to Hollywood, his most interesting films are his genre pictures — heist films, murder mysteries, con movies, all generally male-centric narratives that he reworks with his own brand of professional pride, machismo and male honor. It’s a man’s world and he revels in it.

“Redbelt” takes Mamet into territory no one otherwise would have predicted, the martial-arts thriller of honorable expert fighters, international competition and sinister organizers who corrupt the process. The sport here is Brazilian Jiu-jitsu, but Mamet hews to the samurai code, with Iraq vet and poor but proud Jiu-jitsu instructor Mike Terry (Chiwetel Ejiofor, all quiet dignity and modesty) as his honorable warrior in a dishonorable world.

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Chiwetel Ejiofor didn’t come out of nowhere when he attracted international acclaim for his haunting breakthrough performance in Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things, playing an illegal immigrant from Nigeria with a devastating past, but it seemed that way. After all, he looked to be well into his thirties and in complete command of his craft. How could we have missed such a seasoned actor?

In fact, he was much younger than appeared on screen, but he was seasoned, largely on stage, and he’s continued to hone his craft and expand his range. He has since worked with Woody Allen (Melinda and Melinda), Spike Lee (Inside Man), Alfonso Caurón (Children of Men), and Ridley Scott (American Gangster), starred in Joss Whedon’s Serenity, and played in Talk To Me opposite Don Cheadle. Now he stars in David Mamet’s new film Redbelt, playing a Jiu-jitsu master and teacher who puts his honor on the line when his code is put at risk. I talked to the actor in early April for GreenCine.

Your character is very self-possessed through the entire film, both on and off the mat. How did learning the moves and the rhythms of the martial art on the mat carry over to the way you informed how your character moved and held himself through the rest of the film?

When you’re learning and when you’re with people who do it, just being around Renato Magno and the Machado Brother allows you to observe how some of these guys carry themselves. With their training and their knowledge, they have a certain grace to their movement, which could be seen to as being rather slow or methodical and thought out. There’s an ease of movement and it comes through constant training, the honing of the body and the honing of these moves, and you find that it becomes how they move in life. They move with an ease and grace and simplicity and it’s almost as if they’re always ready for any situation that comes their way, which in fact they are. They’re mentally prepared and that’s part of how the training and the philosophy blends into life and lifestyle anyway. So that was observation, but I was also feeling my body change and feeling more confident with the Jiu-jitsu aspect of it, and allowing the confidence with Jiu-jitsu to affect movement, so that was all part and parcel of creating the character.

Some of my favorite performances of yours involve characters who are very methodical, who do not waste movement. I’m thinking of Dirty Pretty Things, where you play a man who is very still and closed in, but also the agent in Serenity and the underground leader in Children of Men.

They are all very interesting characters and they’re all people who have this sense of the world. In Serenity and Children of Men, there’s a sense of it being a confused or mistaken view of the world, but they have an intrinsic belief system in what they’re doing and somehow that does also manifest itself in their movement and in the way that they approach the world. And Okwe in Dirty Pretty Things has a way of living his life. And there is an economy to his movement, based on the fact that he’s shot part of himself down as a person. So all those things were there and are part of the stories and it’s kind of interesting to utilize the physicality to express ideas and express the depth of emotion or the depth of conviction that suddenly shuts down the way people move and makes them quite limited in their movements. It’s definitely interesting to explore and I think there’s a direct parallel there in that exploration.

The complete interview is here.