1998 in Review: "The Spanish Prisoner"

a thriller, a noir, a comedy, a magic trick

“We must never forget that we are human, and as humans we dream, and when we dream we dream of money.”

In the late ‘90s, teenagers like me had their minds blown almost every week at the movies: Dark City, The Truman Show, The Matrix, The Sixth Sense, Being John Malkovich, The Usual Suspects, Fight Club. These films redefined the viewer’s world either through twist endings or visions of alternate realities pulsing beneath our own. It’s not surprising that the film, which does pull the rug out from under the viewer several times, is typically left out of this era’s canon. It’s not sexy or cool, nor does it aim to be. It’s workmanlike, never flashy. It’s smart and funny but in a sour, cynical way. When teenagers dream, they dream about sex and rebellion. The Spanish Prisoner only dreams about cold, hard cash.

It’s a film about adult problems. Joe Ross (Campbell Scott) is an engineer who has invented an algorithm poised to make his bosses a lot of money. The details are left purposefully and hilariously vague. His invention is called “the process.” His bosses believe it will help them “corner the global market,” but what market that is remains elusive. They are old, rich, white guys, so it could be anything. The omission is fitting in a film where no one ever tells each other the truth. On a business trip to the Caribbean, Ross meets mysterious millionaire Jimmy Dell (Steve Martin), who becomes his confidante, promises to set Joe up with his beautiful sister, and then begins voicing concerns that Joe might not be paid what he’s worth by his bosses. Joe is so happy to be mentored by a rich guy that he doesn’t even consider Dell might have an angle of his own.

There’s a class struggle in The Spanish Prisoner, and everyone is perfectly cast in their stratified roles. Martin has always seemed like a chilly rich guy in real life (his novels are often about such characters), but he had never played one before. Here he casts off both his sense of humor and his romantic vulnerability to play an asshole millionaire, but the film still trades on the affection audiences have built up for him over the years. He’s hardly a sympathetic figure, but when underplayed by Martin, we are conditioned to trust him because of all the years we spent laughing at that face. It aligns us with Joe, who wants to trust him for different reasons.  

Scott, meanwhile, embodies his aspirant engineer with the actor’s trademark blend of integrity and opportunism. He’s a guy who claims to have principles, but they mostly revolve around him getting paid. He has tread on this ground before. In Singles, he was the film’s only Gen Xer comfortable wearing a suit to work (he was a public servant, but we all agree he ended up in the private sector, right?), while in Roger Dodger, he excelled as an aging lothario who turns womanizing into a noble quest. There’s something shamefully vulnerable about Scott, and Mamet uses him well here. Joe Ross is no saint. He’s a guy marketing his talents and selling them to the highest bidder, who’s probably not curing cancer with it. He comes across like a hero if only because he’s the most guileless character in the movie. Scott’s unique blend of innocence and sleaze does the heavy lifting.

In time, The Spanish Prisoner morphs from a corporate thriller into a con man movie and eventually into a “wrongfully accused” noir thriller a la The Wrong Man, with Scott’s slippery performance and Mamet’s masterful direction keeping things on an even keel. “You never know who anybody is,” the new office assistant (Rebecca Pidgeon) says to Joe early on, making her an immediate suspect to be part of the con, and why not? This is the kind of film where the person telling you to watch out for someone else is actually the person you need to watch out for. In the end, Mamet’s the one to watch out for. He tells the viewer that he’s screwing with them in so many ways: “the process,” a comically blatant Hitchcockian MacGuffin, is just one. It makes you relax and trust the film the same way you trust a magician who tells you he’s about to trick you. With its misdirection, visual illusions, and astute understanding of the psychology of the viewer, The Spanish Prisoner is actually more of a magic trick than a film, and the presence of Ricky Jay (one of the greatest magicians of our time) as Joe’s lawyer friend is another happy tipoff.

Finally, a word about dialogue: Mamet’s work is always driven by his words (even though he rarely gets enough credit for his filmmaking). His rhythmic dialogue often draws attention to itself, a style that effortlessly jibes with the formalist constructions of theater but is only intermittently successful in film. He writes in iambic pentameter and, quite honestly, it takes some getting used to. But it definitely works best when his characters are selling something, like the con men in this film, Heist, or House of Games, or the beat-up salesmen in Glengarry Glen Ross, as it draws attention to the sales job. In reality, almost everyone in Mamet’s works is selling something. You could argue that’s his bleak worldview: we’re all salesmen, all of the time. His conspicuous dialogue style is just more accessible when the salesmanship is part of the text.

In a sense, it’s strange that The Spanish Prisoner didn’t appeal more to my teenaged self. It’s a carousel dipped in acid, a delightfully self-conscious work with a sick, rotted core that conformed to my adolescently cynical view of the world. It’s also built around a childlike character. After all, Joe is the only one who displays any emotion. Everyone else acts out of cold self-interest. He’s like a child in a grown-up world whose major life decisions hinge on hurt feelings and a fear of abandonment. Another filmmaker might make him a hero—the only earnest soul in a world of fakers—but Mamet sees him as a guy who dreams of money but convinces himself it was about justice. In the end, The Spanish Prisoner asks if they’re the same thing, and it’s hard to imagine a more damning indictment of our grownup world.

Next in 1998 in Review: “Two Girls and a Guy” and “U.S. Marshals”