"Redbelt" (2008) - Movie Review

At the finish of David Mamet’s “Redbelt”, there is strong semblance with the style, concept and visual with Kurosawa’s and I was duly confirmed in Wiki. Mamet has his stronghold on words bumping up from his members and crew in his film. “Redbelt” is a physical meditation of action than word battling of philosophical disposition. Chiwetel Ejiofor presents Mike Terry in a serenity and mind living the principles of the martial art, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. It is a performance emitting capability of reflecting the director’s attitude and film’s composition.

As with Mamet’s film this has a strange collection and layers to it than it seems. It happens linearly and the action of one character bodes upon into a resultant of series of small events. Mike Terry is a man thriving on purity through his practice of his martial art. He runs an academy with his fashion designing wife Sondra (Alice Braga). Money is on low and Terry preaches his art as easy and calm one can imagine. The fight floor in his school begins with a traditional idea of plausible real life scenario.

Two white marbles along with a black is placed on a bowl and the fighters pick randomly one marble each. If it is a black one, the fighter has to be physically challenged based on another chart to make them fight with one hand or hands tied or legs tied etc. Like situations wherein combat involves injured person defending him, this replicates and in fact identifies the unknown territories of rhythm, action and impact. Mike operates among the fighters on constantly pesters them with the idea of suggesting the escape, attack and release. But he is the teacher and he knows what he is doing. As much as the fighters are in control or trying to be in control on one another, Mike has the ultimate control. He orchestrates and dances along with them. This is how Mamet introduces into the world of one man’s rigorous code of warrior.

This is an unusual film and it is not a film about fight or one’s involvement in it, rather it works both as a drama and inspirational. How principled a person can be and how much he can shred off the regular life of an ordinary and how far does it goes? Is there a breaking point in a lone warrior teaching the art of practicing it unemotionally and objectively? It is imbibed as instincts but can we master it? And the film does not answer but the feeling running on Mike is an interesting state of mind. It is not glittering through scenes but sprouts up and is scattered across in a supporting character or a situation or the body language.

The problems with principled personas are their idealistic nature for everything to fall in place. It is a state of denial on seeing things way more clearly. Everything can be tackled and there is always a passage to escape in tighten grip on one’s throat is Mike’s belief. It is and it is not. World works on its own clock and it runs the errands through diverse minds of people. The drop of event with an accidental tense shooting involving Mike’s primary student and a cop Joe (Max Martini)’s gun by a lost and traumatized lawyer (Emily Mortimer) without any loss of life ripples apart into sequential events of distress. It does not ensemble together but journeys its way into the story on a fight match and the financial constraints.

“Redbelt” has a regular final fight but it is not a formulaic fight one would expect out of a film involving martial arts. It has everything a drama could have and it has a terrific two minute performance by Gini Collins as Joe’s wife. I have never seen or known her performance in any other film but she cracks the screen on that emotional vortex of showing angry grief of loss and pain towards Ejiofor’s character and blows him internally into zillion pieces of guilt and remorse.

Mamet’s films have the exact chiseled piece of scenes. It is a film edited to perfection with a screenplay penned picture perfect. It fits as a film and plays as a reality. The mood is uneven and slow but the rhythm it practices has an effect to lay it on us to have visual exercise of fine presentation. It is composed of elemental formulaic plots given in an unformulated and unconventional style of realism. “Redbelt” as it moves acts on its character for a traditional film of fight match is actually a story of one man’s principle and his code of enduring it in unknown set tough times.