I've always found it odd that movies about moviemaking tend to come from young directors, who haven't any perspective on the profession yet. To point the camera back at Hollywood at all is an exercise in self-indulgence, but the results are generally more satisfying when it's an old hand behind that camera. (Every year at the Toronto International Film Festival, I must sit through two or three debut films that are about the biz, and none of them ever hold a candle to Robert Altman's career abstract The Player.) Playwright, script doctor, and highbrow filmmaker David Mamet skewers the pre-production stage of big-budget features in his latest motion picture State and Main, and while it's more insightful than most of its kin about the screenwriter's place in the food chain (no surprise there), I can't help but think its last line, "Cue the dead horse," should have been the first, because Mamet beats one from the get-go.

The setting for this screwball-ish comedy is a Vermont hamlet in which "The Old Mill" will soon be shot--though not before the project is renamed: turns out the town's old mill, the very reason they set up shop there, burned down decades ago. (Like many of State and Main's ironies, this plot development hopes we were born yesterday; that the film's title setting would be overlooked during the initial location scout is maddeningly illogical.) The start date is also threatened by one star's (Alec Baldwin) paedophilic fling and another's (Sarah Jessica Parker) refusal to perform a nude scene.

In the meantime, a local woman (Rebecca Pidgeon) becomes muse to the insecure screenwriter (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a theatre vet. Pidgeon, Mamet's wife, vacillates between robotic and just plain terrible, as always: she has the glassy-eyed stare of someone being fed her lines off-screen. Aside from nepotism, Mamet is guilty of leaving several story strands flapping in the breeze, and I can't believe that his years of experience with such ripe targets as Brian De Palma amounted to this. In the end, State and Main so much resembles the cinema-obsessed work regularly generated by naive film school graduates that it might be more prudent to call it brilliant parody.-Bill Chambers