• U.S.

Cinema: Shaggy Don Story THINGS CHANGE

2 minute read
Richard Corliss

Old Gino (Don Ameche) has started to enjoy himself. A few days ago, this sad, gracious Italian American was an anonymous Chicago bootblack. Now circumstance — his resemblance to an aging Mafia don accused of murder — has landed him in the capacious bathroom of a penthouse suite at Lake Tahoe, accompanied by his friend Jerry (Joe Mantegna) and two attentive chorus girls. So he tells them the fable of The Ant and the Grasshopper. The ant, he work all-a the time. The grasshopper, he do nothin’ but play. And at the end, “the grasshopper eat-a the ant.”

Neither man is used to such luxury. Their lives have been litanies of obsequiousness, shining the shoes and licking the boots of the powerful. Jerry is a gangland gofer, and his fluky luck makes him edgy. But if all of Tahoe mistakes Gino for an underworld big shot — “the guy behind the guy behind the guy” — Jerry will play out the sham. “Everybody likes you,” he notes, “when you’re someone else.”

Things Change smells of cigar smoke and draft from the tap. It has the gimlet-eyed sentiment that used to lace the fiction of big-city newshawks like Damon Runyon and Ben Hecht. Woody Allen toured this territory in Broadway Danny Rose, but that movie was mostly texture. This one is pure text; performance, direction, atmosphere are all driven by the warp speed of narrative. Mamet’s cagey, coiled playwright prose is on holiday here, but you are unlikely to miss it. Instead, you share the pleasure he takes in spinning a favorite old tale in the shank of a lazy back-room evening with the boys. — R.C.

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