Homicide (1991)

Strong and Moving!

A Masterpiece!

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

I saw this film on video when it came out, and have published two reviews about it elsewhere over the years. Having read all the other reviews of it on this site I can say only that I am astounded both that anyone should think the ending is weak, and that no one seems really to understand it at all. Though Mamet is a Jew, and may have written this with a deliberately Jewish theme, this is a film that is ultimately not about Jews at all.There are two distinct strands to "Homicide", and they come together at the end. Detective Robert Gold is on the trail of a black gangster who has not simply blood but police blood on his hands. In addition to tracking down this guy he is given the task of looking into what appears to be an attack on an influential Jewish family. Gold resents this not because they are Jews but because he has a more important task at hand, and doesn't like people higher up the food chain pulling wires to curry favour at his expense - as he sees it. However, this alleged attack is quickly linked in his mind as in other people's with the murder of a lowly, elderly shopkeeper who as well as being Jewish has a semi-secret past. When he finds a piece of paper on a rooftop, a piece of paper with a strange word written on it, he becomes convinced there is a conspiracy at work, and without realising it, becomes drawn into an entirely different conspiracy himself.Robert Gold is first and foremost a police officer, a specialist hostage negotiator, he realises at the end of the film that this rather than his ethnic or lapsed religious identity is what defines him, and that he has betrayed his own kind. Alas, he is not the only one, because the man he is hunting has been betrayed after a fashion, by his own mother. And when Gold learns the prosaic truth about the murder of the shopkeeper and the true significance of that piece of paper, he realises the extent of his own folly.Truly a masterpiece.

I have deliberated whether to give it a 6 or a 7. From my point of view it should be somewhere around 6.5, but I think that a score of 7 would be to high for it.The good about 'Homicide' is the story and the fine act. I always found Joe Mantegna to be a good actor, playing smart, talkative characters. The plot is nice (though have some flaws).The main problem of the movie, in my opinion, is the slow pace. It takes about an hour till things start rolling. Its' pace and the twist at the end reminded me of Francis Ford Coppolas' 'The Conversation'. But its' shorter, and not as satisfying as the latter.

I just saw Homicide for the first time and I was quite impressed. It is very much a Mamet film, film about men and their world, with a setting that fits a B film but a deeper message that reaches (and sometimes over reaches) for the stars. I often find my self thinking, why is this man, this talent picking this subject when he wants to make something profound and beautiful? But then you just can't take your eyes of the professionalism and you find your self being dragged into an ultra masculine world full of shallow and surprisingly deep meanings, side by side.Homicide is one of his deeper films but it is impossible to talk about why it is good without revealing the end of the film, so SPOILERS! There are not many films about a detective who does not solve the case, who starts running in the wrong direction and looses him self on the way. That alone is praiseworthy. What is even rarer is to find a film that manages to make that mean something, give that a deeper meaning. I believe the film is quite postmodern. We can't look for the truth without taking some of our self into that search. Sometimes it just colors our conclusions but at other times it takes us into the wrong direction. Here is a hero looking for a self identity and he mixes that up into the case and gets the wrong answers. The word he was looking for had nothing to do with the case. It was just pigeon seeds. No conspiracy, nothing. Just like everyone told him, someone desperate looking for money. The scary thing is that we all do this, every single day of the year. When we listen to the news, when we justify our actions, when we help our friends. We filter what we hear and see through what we know and hold dear. What comes out is never the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It might resemble the truth, if we are lucky! END OF SPOILERS!!!This film is not without faults. It feels like a stage play at times. You can feel that Mamet has not managed to lave the theatre behind even though the film is quite visual. The problem is the acting. It is not bad, it's just not film acting, if you get my drift.

Give me Joe Mantegna and William H. Macy as partners and I'll guarantee that there will be a movie worth watching. Macy has been moving up the chain, and is brilliant here.The whole issue of Jewish persecution is woven in the story, and Mantegna is conflicted because he is Jewish, but obviously not a practicing one. As things go, his Jewishness is challenged by the investigation. "You say you are a Jew, and you can't read Hebrew. What are you then?" He is finally confronted with the reality of hate and his role as a cop takes second place to his Jewishness.It is about realizing that he is nowhere until he finds out who he really is. The language of the police is raw and brings everything out into the open. Detective Gold (Mantegna) doesn't find himself at the end of the film. He has a ways to go, but now he has a direction.