Oleanna

David Mamet's fascinating polemic about sexual abuse in the workplace. A college teacher confers with a coed in his office to talk about her poor work, and all hell breaks lose with accusations. What were the teacher's motives? Does the student become the pawn of a feminist study group? This is the kind of all-too-rare picture that creates conversation on the way home from the movie theater.

Mamet's layering of issues -- academic freedom, violence to women, political correctness, materialism, elitism -- is masterful, as is his use of broken dialogue -- the sentences stretch out here like a row of jagged stones.

There's so much emotion and so many ideas in this film that it's both angering and exhilarating. The acting is fine, the writing superb, the production crisp.

Oleanna is Mamet's form of intellectual hazing, and we seated in the theater are, alas, his victims. [11 Nov 1994, p.05]

Oleanna slips to the level of a crass political cartoon, not an examination of human conduct embracing its problematic complexity. And after the first meeting blows up in his face, you can't believe the prof and the student would meet again alone in his office. There's nothing bringing them and keeping them together except the playwright's need to play out his scenario. [11 Nov 1994, p.47]

As a piece of theater, Oleanna's stylized dialogue and strict three-act schematic structure probably worked in the drama's favor; but on film, the techniques are jarring within the naturalistic settings. Mamet, who has written and directed three previous films, should have known better than to preserve the excessively theatrical aspects of his material.

David Mamet's Oleanna, adapted from his two-character play, is about sexual harassment, but it's the audience for this movie that gets harassed. Mamet must mean for this movie to be as enjoyable as fingernails scraping a blackboard. For both men and women, watching it is intended as an act of penance for all our sexist, elitist, feminist, patriarchal ills.