"Communism's over? Huh! That's what they said about Warner Brothers in 1985!" Just a taste of the zappiest, snappiest dialogue available in the London film festival, and there are plenty more gags where that came from in David Mamet's State and Main, a light Capra-esque comedy that riffs amusingly, if insubstantially, on the theme of Hollywood versus America.
William H Macy is a haggard film director strung out on his own nervous energy, who turns up in a picturesque little town with a caravan of faintly unwholesome movie folk, including Bob Barrenger (Alec Baldwin), a louche leading man with a taste for underage girls. It turns out that they have been virtually run out of the last town they were in by creditors, so now they have to make their movie with whatever buildings happen to be around them. Philip Seymour Hoffman is Joseph, a once promising dramatist, lured into writing the screenplay for this film and now driven to distraction by fanatical demands for rewrites from Macy and from Marty Rossen (David Paymer), the quicksilver- tempered producer.
Hoffman (who is everywhere at the LFF this year) gives a performance that establishes him credibly as a romantic funny-valentine-type leading man, as he spurns the sexual advances of leading lady Claire (Sarah Jessica Parker) in favour of the brainy bookstore owner Ann, nicely played by Rebecca Pidgeon, a performance of much more style and ease than the one she produced in The Winslow Boy, David Mamet's unhappy and baffling excursion into British drawing-room drama.
Hoffman's basso profundo voice is always at its most compelling when it slows right down to a 45rpm-single-played-at-33rpm drawl, indicating agonised indecision and introspection: the kind of semi-inchoate groan that he first treated us to in Todd Solondz's Happiness. We get some of this here, and some of his gamely perky persona, his attempt to get along and go along with whatever craziness the movie industry is going to dish out.
It wouldn't be a David Mamet film without some sort of deception and illusion, and this duly arrives when Hoffman is forced to choose between his principles and his need to clamber up the Hollywood ladder. As in his stage play Speed-the-Plow, Mamet uses the wicked world of showbiz and the movies as the showcase for some fairly undemanding ethical dilemmas, but there is a lot of fun to be had here, and some terrific performances.
• At the Odeon West End, London WC2, tomorrow, and the Empire, London WC2, on Sunday. Box office: 020-7928 3232.
