For years I’ve worked as a reporter covering the commercial real estate industry and so it hasn’t been without some embarrassment that I’ve been forced to admit I still hadn’t seen Glengarry Glen Ross, what has become something of a cultural touchstone for the profession, for better or worse.
During a recent conversation with a broker, he referenced how his new firm provided him with enhanced connections to clients and articulated the magnitude of that advantage by referencing how “leads” were a central, obsessive focus for Glengarry’s characters.
“Remember Glengarry Glen Ross?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said vaguely.
“It’s all about the leads.'You got the leads? Who’s got the leads?'” he went on. I knew he was quoting lines of dialogue, or trying to.
Another broker I spoke with brought up the movie when expressing the disgust that society holds for his ilk. He blamed the film for presenting, or at least reinforcing the stereotype of brokers as sleazy, schlocky salesmen whose spiritual death spiral is either hastened or entirely brought on by their profession.
I guess it was time to finally see the film...at least so I won’t have to quickly shift subjects the next time it inevitably comes up. This time, when it does, I'll be sure to ask whoever it is about their favorite scene. Even if you didn’t connect with the film, you must remember a number of its characters’ tirades. The expletive riddled denunciations and insults that the film’s characters hurl at each other hold their own against other movies that feel close to it in theme and style, like the borderline sociopaths Neil LaBute sets loose in a classic like In the Company of Men. Glengarry Glen Ross's memorable dialogue and the spot-on performances by its star-studded cast are probably why the movie holds such a hallowed place in brokerage lexicon, even though in so many ways it seems to indict the profession. It's a phenomenon similar to the way that Gordon Gekko made the morally repugnant creed “Greed is Good” a proud slogan of investment bankers.
Most of the action in Glengarry Glen Ross is centered in the dingy office of a real estate brokerage in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. Shelley Levene, played by Jack Lemon, is in a worrying bind. In an advanced stage of his career and with a sick daughter he speaks quickly with on the telephone at the start of the film, he’s locked in a dry spell, although one does wonder if he ever experienced any form of real success or whether his recollections of past accomplishments aren’t just delusions and exaggeration. Mitch and Murray, the unseen owners of the firm, have sent Blake - depicted in all his bull-like glory by Alec Baldwin, part intimidator and drill sergeant with a sprinkling of motivational speaker - to relay to the firm’s four brokers that only the top two of them will be kept on at the end of the month.
“What’s your name?” Dave Moss (Ed Harris), the hothead of the group – if one character gets to own that distinction among this volatile, profane lot – asks challengingly.
“Fuck you. That’s my name,” Blake responds. One of the film’s many classic lines. “You drove a Hyundai to get here tonight. I drove an $80,000 BMW. That’s my name.”
High level.
A desperate night ensues as Levene kicks into overdrive to try selling what are likely worthless plots of land in places like Florida and Arizona and Moss fumes and schemes with fellow broker George Aaronow (Alan Arkin), devising a plan to burglarize the sales office and make off with a stack of promising leads that are being carefully guarded by the office manager John Williamson (Kevin Spacey). Levine toils away, dripping wet in a driving rain, rattling off canned pitches in phone booths that are bathed in the stark neon lights of a grim, unforgiving city. In the commentary, the film’s director James Foley said that he chose a bright color palette to enunciate the primal underpinnings of the story’s theme. According to him, in every scene, these men were fighting for their lives and an almost surreal moment when Lemon stands in a phone booth awash in luminescent water was an “image of the heavens weeping.”
Dramatic, yes, but this is Mamet's screenplay afterall.
Dramatic, yes, but this is Mamet's screenplay afterall.
Plush reds dominate a Chinese restaurant around the corner from the sales office, where Ricky Roma (Al Pacino), the outfit’s most successful broker, spends the night reeling in a buyer with seeming effortlessness. But by the end we see the pathetic manipulations to which he will stoop in order to hang onto the modest sale as it begins to unravel. Salesmanship, at least among these men, is little more than a confidence game, disconnected from morality and driven by hand to mouth urgency.
In the commentary, Foley likens the men to animals.
“I thought of the film as animalistic, every being on screen is an organic beast and animal that is trying to survive and do what it has to do and morality is a secondary issue,” he says.
The ABCs of brokerage according to Blake are simply “Always Be Closing.”
The film, according to repute, was nicknamed “Death of a Fucking Salesman” by the cast for the way it fits in as an update of the Arthur Miller play, laced abundantly of course with profanity. Though it’s been some years since I’ve read or seen Death of a Salesman, things would appear to have gotten a lot worse in the sales business if one was to just compare the two stories.
In Death of a Salesman, Miller at least seems to offer the audience an idea of what mistakes, delusions, and moral lapses derailed Willy Loman’s life. Mamet doesn’t have his characters engage in much reflection or offer them much of a chance at redemption.
Shelley Levene, destined for failure, never achieves or even seeks out any state of grace. When he momentarily gains the upper hand late in the film, he can only think to pettily berate Spacey’s unsympathetic office manager for a few fleeting moments of gratification and revenge before the circumstances again abruptly shift out of his favor. It is then that he offers up his daughter’s illness as a last ditch plea for mercy. Instead, we feel the final nugget of sympathy we may hold for the man flicked away.
I may not have loved the film for its failure to redeem any of its protagonists, but at least now I know why so many brokers can’t forget the film...and why so many want to.
