Things Change

 Shel Silverstein and David Mamet wrote the script for Things Change, a sweet-tempered 1988 movie that Mamet also directed.  The film is a fairy tale that, once its premise is established, is wholly predictable although in a satisfying way.  The picture stars Mamet's surrogate and stand-in, Joe Mantegna, and Don Ameche, playing against type as a humble, dim-witted shoeshine man who speaks with a vaudeville Italian accent so broad and stylized as to be marginally offensive.  Ameche's dignified appearance, contrasted with his caricatured speech, is perfect for the part, the role of an unassuming urban peasant who is taken for the capo of capos in the Chicago mob.  

Ricky Jay, a fixture in all Mamet's movies, summons the shoeshine man to a meeting with a Chicago gangster.  The gangster promises to buy a fishing boat for the shoeshine man (Ameche) if he will agree to take the fall for a gangland shooting and serve three-years in prison for the crime.  The shoeshine man, reluctantly, agrees and gives his word to accept the frame-up the next Monday after a weekend.  Joe Mantegna, playing a minor thug who is on probation for bungling an assignment, is told to keep the shoeshine man in his company for the whole weekend so he doesn't back out of the gig.  The gangster has the civilian sign a confession and leaves him under Mantegna's supervision.  Mantegna, feeling sorry for the man, decides that they will spend the weekend in Lake Tahoe.  And, so, they fly out to Reno.  While checking into a Tahoe resort, another apprentice gangster played by the great William Macy, mistakes Ameche for the big boss in gangland Chicago.  The odd couple, Mantegna and Ameche, are lodged on the Criterion floor of the resort in palatial surroundings with the lodge's promise that "(their) money is no good in the establishment."  They gamble and Ameche wins $30,000 in a fixed game, but, then, loses in the next game that is not fixed.  They gambol with some showgirls who are touched by Ameche's grandfatherly gravitas.  Ameche and Mantegna are invited to the mansion of the Vegas boss where the shoe-shine man and the crime-lord, played effectively by the fearsome Bob Proskey, bond over drinks and cigars.  Everything that Ameche says is interpreted in light of his presumed status as the big Boss from Chicago.  In fact, Ameche doesn't have much of actual interest to say -- he utters gnomic remarks about shining shoes which are taken as profound apothegms from a terrifying organized-crime boss.  (The film bears more than a passing resemblance to Being There, the 1979 Hal Ashby film in which Peter Sellers as a moronic gardener is accepted as a political wise man, his statements about weeding and planting and pruning all interpreted as oracular wisdom.)  There are some close calls and misunderstandings, but this being a fairy tale we anticipate that everything will be worked-out in the end.  When Mantegna and Ameche miss their plane back to Chicago, they hijack a car and drive to the Windy City, apparently in one night -- by this point, the fairy-tale aspects of the story are obvious.  The attentive reader will be able to guess the innocuous plot twists engineered by Silverstein and Mamet for the climax.

Things Change is minor Mamet, an amusing exercise in the writer's extreme stoicism transplanted into the narrative machinery of a Maerchen.  The dialogue is characteristically clipped, laconic, and repetitive.  The picture is droll, but, not really funny.  The film's ending is satisfying.  Ameche's performance as an honorable dullard is notable and the rest of the cast is excellent as well.  The film is a successful divertissement.