Phil Spector

David Mamet’s HBO film Phil Spector is less about the famous Wall of Sound producer than about Mamet himself, the screenwriter and director. It’s his general vision not a historical document. Indeed Mamet admits as much in his disclaimer: "This is a work of fiction. It's not 'based on a true story.' It is a drama inspired by actual persons in a trial, but it is neither an attempt to depict the actual persons, nor to comment upon on the trial or its outcome." Yeah, right.

Of course the film presents Al Pacino’s very persuasive interpretation of Spector. The film also draws the broad outline of the trial and in a postscript its conclusion. Spoiler alert: Spector is in jail. But if we set the facts of that character and the trial aside, if we take the film as Mamet’s meditation, then it is clearly about a few themes beyond Spector’s case.

The primary theme is Mamet’s familiar reaction against liberal right-think. He demonstrates the liberal’s reflexive assumption that the woman must be the innocent victim, the powerful man must be the killer, especially if the woman is poor and the man is rich. Against this kneejerk and righteous bias any scientific evidence has no effect. Mamet makes this point by tracing the conversion of lawyer Linda Kenney Baden (Helen Mirren) from assuming Spector was guilty to appreciating there is at least an unreasonable doubt of his guilt. With Talmudic rigour Mamet calls for the rich to be accorded the same justice as the poor. 

So must the freakish. Hence the lunacy and outrageous egotism, dress and hair of Mamet’s Spector. However violent the character may have been in the past, however crazy his affect may seem, however rampaging his egotism, none of that proves him guilty of the trial’s particular charge. Again, the ballistic science must be paid its due. Here Mamet's Spector joins the long line of respectable crazies he cites, from Lenny Bruce to Jimi Hendrix to the pre-Yoko bald hermit John Lennon. To these free spirited eccentrics justice must be paid.

Finally, the film coheres with Mamet’s controversial recent defense of the present gun “regulation” in America. As he recently argued, if the president can have armed guards for his children, why shouldn’t ordinary citizens? In this film Mamet discourages the assumption that a man who owns guns in necessarily responsible for any fatal mishaps they may cause. It also defends the apparently unbalanced -- in this case the creative -- against prejudgment. 

As one character remarks about the complexity of layers in a Spector musical production, “The truth is somewhere in the mix.” Don‘t go to this film for any truth about Spector and his failed date and the trial. True to the dynamic of fiction, Mamet’s subject is about the larger interplay of elements of which the Spector history may or may not be one instance. His subject is the prejudice by which even -- or rather, particularly -- the righteous can blind themselves to any alternative reality. That can preclude justice. 

Full disclosure. Despite the fact I’m a self-respecting liberal who finds it hard to agree with anything Mamet proposes, I have to respect the power of his writing, his ear for dialogue, his eye for metaphor, and his masterful direction of his powerhouse cast here.