Glengarry Glen Ross

Third prize is you're fired (Playtime: Part 4 of 4)

From left to right: Alan Arkin, Alec Baldwin, Jack Lemmon, and Ed Harris.

It’s hard to care about these guys, the “salesmen” from Glengarry Glen Ross. Small-time con men like these have been around forever. I used to hang up on them when they called the landline at my childhood home. Guys like these are the reason no one accepts calls now from unknown numbers. They’re obnoxious and ubiquitous, like mosquitos, and just as insignificant.

There are four of them in Glengarry Glen Ross. By the metric used in the movie, monthly sales, Shelly Levene (played by the appropriately named Jack Lemmon) is the worst of them. He’s suffering from a dry spell and hasn’t sold any dubious investment property to gullible buyers this month. At the top of the food chain is the silver-tongued Richard Roma (Al Pacino), with $90,000 in sales. He misses a mandatory meeting because he spots a mark at the Chinese restaurant across the street from the office where the salesmen drink and commiserate. George Aaronow (Alan Arkin) seems the dimmest of the bunch, but at least he’s on the board with $7,000. Dave Moss (Ed Harris) has $27,500 in sales and is the most disgruntled of the group, complaining incessantly about the garbage leads doled out to the quartet of salesmen, two a day, like placebo pills from a fraudulent doctor. 

What are these leads? Let me tell you. Once, I went to Home Depot and saw a sign for home water testing. I had just moved into a new house and was curious about the water quality, so I mailed a plastic vial filled with tap water and a card with my information to a company that would analyze it for lead and other contaminants at no cost to me. For the next three months, I received multiple calls every day from obnoxious reps wanting to sell me an expensive and unnecessary filtration system to treat hard water. I was dumb enough to think a company would analyze my tap water for free, so this made me a viable lead, unlike most of the leads distributed by the office manager, John (Kevin Spacey), on behalf of the real estate company. 

The real estate company sends their top salesman, Blake (Alec Baldwin at peak virility, who plays what is essentially a serious version of his 30 Rock character), to fire up the underperforming salesmen and to deliver the message that the top two performers will receive prizes and the bottom two will be fired. Blake puts on a masterclass in dominating a dick-measuring contest, cutting down the other salesmen for their pitiful sales and loser attitudes. He stops Levene from getting coffee because “coffee’s for closers only.” He mocks Moss for driving a Hyundai while he drives an $80,000 BMW. He takes off his watch, which he says costs more than Moss’s car, tells him he made $970,000 last year, and asks how much Moss made. He casually leaves the expensive watch on Moss’s desk while he talks, reclaiming it later as an afterthought. Blake equates success with masculinity and calls the men awful homophobic slurs that were all the rage in the 90s while they sit and take it. This isn’t an inspiring speech. Blake is there to remind these men of an uncomfortable truth, which is that they are insignificant. He challenges them to gain significance and reclaim their masculinity by making sales. 

This movie feels dated because nowadays, scams are big, and con artists are larger than life. Elizabeth Holmes raised $700 million from investors and polished a turd into a $9 billion company. Bernie Madoff ran a Ponzi scheme worth $65 billion and took millions from the likes of John Malkovich, Kevin Bacon, and Elie Wiesel. Another guy manufactured the aura of a successful executive on a reality TV show and became the president of the United States. 

The guys in the movie are small fries, spending days laying the groundwork to set up often-humiliating home visits for a measly $6k commission if they’re lucky. But we see the upside as well. We see why they do this. The top salesman, Richard Roma, reels in a vulnerable mark at the Chinese restaurant, all the right words flowing out of his mouth as if he momentarily has a direct line to the almighty, effortlessly bending the man to his will until he signs on the line that is dotted and surrenders a check. For an evening, Roma is not an insignificant salesman working out of a dirty office.

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Glengarry Glen Ross
Written by David Mamet; Directed by James Foley
1992
100 minutes
English
Recommended way to watch (at time of publication): Netflix
You’ll like this if you like:  Boiler Room (2000), Wall Street (1987)

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