State and Main

State and Main (2000) is David Mamet's Hollywood satire — watch it online on iFILM. A film crew rolls into the tiny Vermont town of Waterford to shoot on the cheap, and within hours discovers that the old watermill central to their entire script burned down years ago. The production adapts, which in Mamet's world means everyone starts lying faster.

Philip Seymour Hoffman plays the screenwriter Joseph Turner White, a man trying to hold onto some version of integrity as the project implodes around him. Alec Baldwin's leading man is quietly managing another statutory incident. Sarah Jessica Parker's star refuses the nude scene she already agreed to. William H. Macy's director negotiates everything in real time with the cheerful pragmatism of someone who long ago stopped believing in art. The town's residents — warm, eccentric, entirely unprepared — get pulled into the machinery one by one.

Mamet wrote the script himself, and the dialogue lands the way his best work does: rhythmic, clipped, with the subtext doing most of the heavy lifting. For fans of sharp ensemble comedy with something darker underneath, this one holds up well. Stream State and Main (2000) on iFILM.