Carla Taylor (Julia Stiles) is a sultry Waterford teenager who reads in a tabloid about Bob Barrenger’s penchant for young girls and decides she wants to have a fling with him. When Carla delivers a tuna BLT to Barrenger’s hotel room, they share a glass of bourbon and milk, and thus begins their romantic relationship. But one night while Barrenger and Carla are out for a drive, he flips the car in an accident that slightly injures both of them and knocks out the traffic signal at State and Main.
There’s an investigation of the auto accident, and it turns out that Joe White was the only witness. White is afraid that if he reveals that Barrenger was with an underage girl, he will be letting down all the other people working on the movie. White also knows that if he doesn’t tell the truth, he will probably ruin his chances with Ann. As White wrestles with his dilemma, he encounters the town’s bow-tie-wearing physician and asks his advice. But Doc has none to offer, telling White, "The truth is you should never trust anybody who wears a bow tie. A cravat is supposed to point down to accentuate the genitals. Why do you want to trust somebody whose tie points out to accentuate his ears?"
Marty Rossen (David Paymer), the producer of The Old Mill, manages to come up with a million dollars from a computer company called Bazoomer.com in return for product placement, and this money is used to solve some of the film’s problems. State and Main then goes on to show how the movie finally gets made without an old mill and how product placement for a dot-com is handled in a film set in 1895. We are shown one scene being shot, and it looks as though the movie will be just terrible. During a break in the shooting, Bob Barrenger gets the last line, "Well, it beats working."
As for the acting in State and Main, David Paymer stands out as the tough-talking movie producer as he convincingly delivers confrontational lines like, "Well, I’m gonna solve it here or this bimbo you sent me is gonna be doin’ a donkey act on public access television!" William H. Macy is memorable as the director who manipulates people any way he can and when caught being untruthful says, "It’s not a lie -- it’s a gift for fiction." Julia Styles is just right as the small-town girl who seduces a movie star to put some excitement into her boring life. And Rebecca Pidgeon is winsome as the likable local woman who dispenses pearls of wisdom such as, "Everybody makes their own fun. If you don’t make it yourself, it ain’t fun -- it’s entertainment."
State and Main is a very funny movie, but it’s not a feel-good comedy -- its treatment of the filmmakers is downright nasty. This is in marked contrast to another farce about movie-making: Francois Truffaut’s great Day for Night (1973), a valentine to filmmaking that chronicles the shooting of a mediocre movie called Meet Pamela. Still, I enjoyed the humor in State and Main, and I liked the way Mamet wasn’t afraid to be politically incorrect. While State and Main isn’t particularly interesting visually and doesn’t offer much in the way of music, its extremely witty dialogue and quirky characters manage to carry the film, and I definitely recommend it.Previous Page State and Main Page 1, 2
