And then there is Glengarry Glen Ross. I am hard pressed to think of a film where an ensemble works so well that each actor puts in arguably his best-ever screen turn … and considering the cast is comprised of Jack Lemmon, Al Pacino, Alan Arkin, Ed Harris, Kevin Spacey, Alec Baldwin, and Jonathan Pryce, that's sayin' somethin', homie. The film is so brilliantly acted that you start forgetting it's about real estate. David Mamet's script (based on his play, also arguably his masterpiece) is as testosterone-fueled and potentially emasculating as you would expect, but the heart of the story entails such amazing male desperation that the actors almost can't help but deliver some of the most intimately private emotion ever filmed. The plot itself entails a bottom-feeding real-estate office populated by several sad souls whose successes amount to scamming the gullible out of their hard-earned money, being suddenly forced to put up or shut up when a hotshot salesman (Baldwin at his most astounding) comes in to inform them of the company's most recent internal promotion, wherein the most productive "closer" wins a Cadillac, the runner-up gets a set of steak knives, and everyone else gets fired. This sends everyone scrambling into a number of directions, ranging from renewed motivation to embittered planning to rob the office. Everyone is so on-the-mark here that it's almost frightening, making GGR one of the best films of the 90s and one of the few critics' darlings of that era that remains compulsively watchable even if you've seen it a couple of times. If anything is a strike against the film, it's that the direction and cinematography are to some extent merely functional, a bit too stage-bound and not sufficiently perfect, giving the film overall a somewhat "made for HBO" quality. But any degree of flashy direction would most likely have detracted from the stellar performances, which are what give Glengarry Glen Ross its longevity.
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