November

Description
David Mamet’s attenuated sketch benefits from a tremendous comedic turn by Nathan Lane as President Charles Smith, a blustering blunderbuss who is up for reelection but has been abandoned by the leaders of his unnamed party. But Mamet apparently feels so overmatched by the perfidy of American politics that he must whip out the verbal equivalent of a machine gun. The f-word turns up 167 times; yet Mamet’s scattershot fusillade still hits no targets of consequence. Sporadically amusing, this farce ultimately seems like an exercise in cynical apathy: a political comedy that, for all its profanity, doesn’t give a fuck about anything.—AF