Review: The Spanish Prisoner (1998)
Basically, “Last Days of Disco” sold out minutes before I got to the movie theater. The people right in front of me were the first ones turned away, one of those if-I-hadn’t-sat-on-my-ass-those-five-minutes moments. But I did want to see “The Spanish Prisoner”, having liked “House of Games” a lot when I saw it a few years ago.
“The Spanish Prisoner” is the story of a man caught in an elaborate con, to separate him from the industrial secrets he holds. He’s the inventor of “the Process”, which will apparently allow his company to corner the market, or something like that. Perhaps he works for Gilette, and what they’re talking about is the new Mach 3 razor, with three (!) blades instead of two. Perhaps not. It’s immaterial: the book he has, with the Process scribbled down as a jumble of nonsense mathematics (clearly taking place in the age before computers) is the object of this game.
David Mamet is supposed to be a master of dialog. I thought the dialog was remarkably annoying in this film. He feels compelled to make his actors repeat things, over and over again. In “House of Games”, this trick conveys a sense of menace, of deliberate probing. It works. In “Spanish Prisoner”, it reminded me of a scene from “The Simpsons”, in which Bart (or Homer) approaches a moment of epiphany. Random words and noises sound like the thing he’s trying to think of (though, probably, if it was Homer, he got it wrong). “Spanish Prisoner” was like this, with the repetitions pointing to something obvious, which the audience should have seen many, many minutes before the folks on screen.
The ending also feels patched together. There was another con working. When it started is unclear: there were no moments when, thinking back on the film, you could have said, ah ha! It comes out of thin air, a deus ex machina, thorougly unexplained and unjustified. The cons fall into two classes, then: those that are telegraphed well in advanced, and those that come out of the blue. Neither is particularly satisfying.
The comparison with “House of Games” is inevitable. There are a series of cons throughout “House”, but they all have these retrospective ah-ha moments. They make sense. Cons are also seen to fail because of contingency: someone in the wrong spot at the wrong time, etc. The con men are not omniscient, not omnipotent. We seem them improvise when things go wrong. And they sometimes fail because of accidents.
As a bonus in “House of Games”, we see some secondary cons: ways to lift money out of an envelope, tricks you can play in a Western Union office, the idea of a tell. In that film, you have a feeling that you’re being let into the con man’s world, a gritty place of smoke-shrouded poker games and greasy spoon diners. This impression that you’re seeing things you’re not supposed to see is missing from “Spanish Prisoner”. “Prisoner” plays out as a caper film of high money and elaborate contrivances. It’s nothing in particular.
One minor plus with “Prisoner”, though, is that it was apparently filmed in my neighborhood. They use the 79th Street IRT, and shoot a few scenes outside the Althrop, this hulking building at 79th and Broadway (It’s apparently hollow on the inside, with a court yard. Rich people live there.)