Between 2009 and the beginning of last week, dramatist and author David Mamet released 16 new plays and books, some of them exceptional. During the same span, filmmaker David Mamet directed either one or zero feature-length pictures, depending on whether one counts the 2013 made-for-TV movie Phil Spector. To say merely that this imbalance saddened fans of the unofficial laureate of American hustlers is very nearly to engage in Mametian deception, so drastically does it undersell the point. Instead, we were miserable. Yes, the Pulitzer winner delivered Race (2009), one of the best new plays in decades, but where was his much-whispered-about John F. Kennedy assassination film? If the absurdist novel The Diary of a Porn Star by Priscilla Wriston-Ranger (2019) could exist, why couldn’t our man’s long-rumored Will Ferrell collaboration, Joan of Bark: The Dog That Saved France?

Needless to say, politics played more than a small role in director Mamet’s long silence. One doesn’t publish Why I Am No Longer a Brain-Dead Liberal (2008) and other conservative cris de coeur if one hopes to maintain one’s relationships in the industry. Yet it is also the case that many of Mamet’s longtime associates are no longer available to be cast, Ricky Jay, Joe Mantegna, and William H. Macy having either died or aged out of their primes. If the filmmaker’s now-streaming 11th feature, Henry Johnson, represents a modest disappointment, the absence of those familiar talents is at least part of the explanation. Mamet hasn’t made his new movie badly by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s at least arguable that he’s made it 30 years too late.