Henry Johnson competes with the American ideal.
David Mamet returns to cinema with Henry Johnson, a film version of his 2023 stage play. Mamet last directed the TV movie Phil Spector in 2013 and the theatrical film Redbelt in 2008. Revisiting his usual conflict of ethics and personality (popularized in the dramas American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross), Mamet addresses what’s gone wrong in contemporary America — wrong to the extent that ethics have become dissatisfying and enigmatic.
That’s why the title Henry Johnson suggests the industrial pioneer Henry Ford, combined with phallic slang. Then Mamet (whose breakthrough play was titled Sexual Perversity in Chicago) utilizes that capitalist parallel by placing the Henry character (portrayed by Evan Jonigkeit) into three one-act dramas, each one representing the millennium’s spiritual turmoil: a law office, a penitentiary, and a prison reading room. These abstract metaphors for legal deformation, social imprisonment, and corrupted meaning are spaces where American experience is currently, frequently twisted. From law practice to jail cell to library setting, Mamet examines a cryptocracy.
The movie’s evocative title uses an otherwise generic name, possibly a bureaucratic designation on a prison ledger or the toe tag on a morgue’s corpse. Jonigkeit’s Henry goes from being the acolyte of legal titan Mr. Barnes (Chris Bauer), to a rookie dominated by prison thug Gene (Shia LaBeouf), then to the kidnapper holding prison guard Jerry (Dominic Hoffman) hostage. The time lapses don’t connect these scenes narratively so much as suggest the potentialities of a constantly warping persona. Henry is a character Mamet refuses to pin down, unlike the title character of his race-sex fantasia Edmond, filmed in 2005 by Stuart Gordon, director of the Re-Animator horror comedy.
There’s comedy in Henry Johnson, but it’s subterranean. That’s because Mamet’s timing is off. His redoubtable TV series The Unit (CBS, 2006–2009), about a Delta Force Special Operations team, aired before Americans felt the need for a patriotic depiction of a warring military; it came before our weary country yearned for trustworthy public officials and intellectual service.
Viewed satirically, Henry Johnson laments — and scoffs at — the absence of principled behavior and social interaction. Henry and Barnes argue about the legality of an abortion case. Henry and Gene tease masculine power dynamics. Henry and Jerry debate “lived experience” in racial terms (with Mamet’s linguistic gymnastics).
Male relationships — whether professional men in suits, inmates in yellow prison togs, or men in unmistakable skin-color contrasts — all speak of competition in a capitalist system, and all induce shared guilt.
Why Mamet chose a moral thesis on abortion is the primary mystery of Henry Johnson. Given the lawfare that tracks the uncertainty of our moral foundation, Henry Johnson is more pertinent than Oleanna, Mamet’s prophesy of the chicanery in the Me Too movement. Obviously, Mamet gets triggered by feminist hypocrisy, but that’s just the beginning of his Savanarola-style disgust.
This film peaks in its second scene, when sexual tension evokes archetypes of class warfare — from the frisson of Sternberg’s magnificent Thunderbolt (which Andrew Sarris called “a fantasy of a prison movie”) to Norman Mailer’s intellectual shock when meeting his homicidal alter ego in the convict John Henry Abbott. Here, LaBeouf’s erotic, psychotic temperament mesmerizes the screen as surely as it intimidates the timid Jonigkeit.
Each scene shows one man’s influence on the other, each narrative reveals inward choices, fear or bravery, panic or desperate rationalizing. The line “If the illusion of law didn’t exist, then how the hell can these fools buy boats” directly addresses the obscenity of lawfare. It almost equals Mamet’s scornful advice in his script for The Edge: “Never feel sorry for a man who owns a plane.” All these ideas make Henry Johnson a work in progress as Mamet seeks a definitive statement on moral conflict such as that in his 1999 film version of The Winslow Boy, Terence Rattigan’s superb play.
Mamet’s austerity and sparseness hold these three sequences together. In the brown-toned law office, the light that comes through a large window casts realistic shadows that are also Expressionist. This imagery makes Henry Johnson a successfully low-budget, 85-minute enterprise, but the similarly spartan S. Craig Zahler (Dragged Across Concrete, Brawl in Cell Block 99) has taken over the exploration of American anomie — the clarification of psychology through violence — that at one time seemed to be Mamet’s main theme. Mamet emphasizes the vernacular like a theatrical soothsayer while Zahler visualizes violence to clarify circumstance and character. Of the two approaches toward America’s behavioral crisis, Zahler’s is more insistently cinematic by far. Their collaboration might produce the psychosocial masterpiece we need.