From con men to real estate closers, David Mamet has made a career out of writing characters who know how to spot a sucker. And with “Henry Johnson,” his first film in 10 years, he invites his devotees to look under the hood and examine the psyche of one of the weak, easily manipulated individuals that his most memorable characters spend their lives exploiting.
Adapted from his play of the same name, which premiered in Los Angeles in 2023 before mounting a Chicago production this spring, “Henry Johnson” unfolds over the course of four two-handed scenes. Like any Mamet endeavor, the real star is the language. Major plot events happen almost entirely offscreen, with its ensemble of characters using them as jumping off points to soliloquize about everything from the value of therapy to Snow White’s vagina. Everyone has preconceived opinions about his writing style, but Mamet puts it to use, with more substance than recent misfires like the endless phone conversation in “China Doll” or the critically panned Harvey Weinstein play “Bitter Wheat.” The Pulitzer winner has something to say, but whether anyone still wants to hear it is another question entirely.
From the moment Henry Johnson (Evan Jonigkeit) appears on screen, he’s working in service of more powerful men. He timidly approaches Mr. Barnes (Chris Bauer), his boss at an unspecified job, with a request to hire a friend of his who is eligible for parole. Mr. Barnes — who emasculates Henry with his body language and confident presence before he ever opens his mouth — doesn’t understand why he should help someone who pleaded guilty to manslaughter and proceeds to grill his employee about his affection for this imprisoned man.
While Henry initially tries to spin his behavior as a benevolent act of kindness, Barnes effectively makes the case that Henry was merely manipulated by a charming sociopath. Furthermore, he reveals that he knows Henry embezzled $300,000 from the company to help pay the man’s defense attorneys, and Barnes has every intention to press charges.
The rest of the film takes place in a prison, where Henry’s gruff but philosophical cellmate, Gene (Shia LaBeouf), tries to teach him the ways of the world. Henry still views the embezzlement as a noble deed, but Gene is certain that only a chump would go out on a limb for someone else without getting something in return. He encourages Henry to be more aggressive in life, no matter the cost. Henry eventually complies in the form of actions that will have to remain unmentioned, as it’s quite easy to spoil a film with only four scenes.
For a character whose actions set so many consequences in motion, Henry is remarkably passive. The kind of empty suit who, as Shiv Roy so memorably put it, will always suck the biggest dick in the room, his only function in life is to make himself useful to one strongman before jumping ship to another when he’s inevitably cast aside. Both Mr. Barnes and Gene subject him to scoldings about how he needs to stand up for himself when other people manipulate him, but he’s never clever enough to see that they’re simply diverting attention from their own schemes to deploy him for their personal benefits.
A prominent Trump supporter whose outspoken opinions have overshadowed his work for the past decade, Mamet presents a fairly damning indictment of weakness in our society that has a wide berth of interpretations depending on where your own views fall. In one sense, Henry is the kind of useless man who creates hard times with his own passivity. Nearly all the film’s tragedy could be avoided if he could just grow a backbone for five consecutive seconds and stand up to a bully. I’m sure there’s someone who’d make the case that a childhood spent replacing seed oils with beef tallow and saying slurs in school could have fixed all of it, but Mamet mercifully never goes there. If anything, the selfish voices in Henry’s ears are closer to the MAGA grifters selling male vitality supplements on the most vile podcasts you’ve ever heard. His own lack of a sense of self creates a vacuum that is immediately filled by nefarious actors who are eager to sell him an illusion of masculinity that hides the fact he’s completely under their thumbs.
Many critics have hailed “Henry Johnson” as Mamet’s best play in years. And while I have not taken in a stage production, I see no reason to disagree with that praise (however faint). But theater and film are wildly different media, and Mamet’s movie does not attempt to adapt his work for a new visual language. The film was unsurprisingly shot in under a week, and the only words added to the shooting script may have been “Fade In” and “Fade Out.”
Mamet’s loquacious characters have always been most at home on stage because there’s no reason to expect them to do anything other than talk. Even the most realistic kitchen sink dramas ever staged aren’t true “realism,” because there’s always the inherent absurdity of watching live actors whose entire world is confined to a small stage. Mamet never takes advantage of film’s capacity to offer a more naturalistic portrayal of human life, and watching two men chew scenery for 20 uninterrupted minutes in an office seems considerably goofier when it’s shot in high definition. There’s also no reason for so much of the action to take place offscreen. The approach worked for Sophocles (and probably for the stage productions of “Henry Johnson” as well), but what comes across as clever in one format simply seems lazy in another.
“Henry Johnson” offers Mamet fans reason to believe that the playwright still has more to offer us than starry “Glengarry Glenn Ross” revivals and Fox News screeds, and the small ensemble cast all make convincing work of the material. But as a film, Mamet’s adaptation should leave you with little more than a desire to see the play.
Grade: C+
“Henry Johnson” opens at the Aero Theatre in Los Angeles and becomes available on VOD on Friday, May 9, with more theatrical markets added throughout May.
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