In Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller made the salesman into a symbol for the failure of the American dream. In Miller’s play, Willy Loman was out there all alone, on a smile and a shoeshine. Glengarry Glen Ross is a version for modern times. Produced onstage in the good times of the 1980s, filmed in the hard times of the 1990s, it shows the new kind of American salesmanship, which is organized around offices and corporations. No longer is a salesman self-employed, going door-to-door.
The not-so-buried subtext of Glengarry Glen Ross is that, for all their ritualized rancor, these salesmen like talking to one another; we get that these are arguments they’ve had before. Not that they have much choice for companionship, as their very particularized form of alienated labor has rendered normal human relationships almost impossible. (One wonderful detail I always come back to: when Shelley artificially inflates his position during phone calls by interjecting orders to his [non-existent] secretary, her name is “Grace,” rather pathetically indicating a quality he lacks). The evident formalist glee that Mamet takes in articulating their hostilities keeps his play—and the movie made from it—from reducing to a simplistic late-capitalist analysis, or even a critique; like his hero and sometimes collaborator Harold Pinter, he’s even more interested in syntax than morality, and even before his post–9/11 slide into strutting wingnuttery, he toggled brazenly between ignoring and outright belittling political correctness.[…]
One notable change between the movie and the play is the omission of several ostentatious, anti-Indian tirades, drawn from the author’s observation of industry racism during his year-long immersion in a Chicago real-estate office; their insidious sentiment is conveyed simply in the movie through Pacino’s incredulous pronunciation of the surname “Patel” as a catch-all for the deadbeat leads he and his co-workers refuse to chase any further.
— Adam Nayman (Reverse Shot)
Synopsis: When an office full of Chicago real estate salesmen is given the news that all but the top two will be fired at the end of the week, the atmosphere begins to heat up. Shelley Levene, who has a sick daughter, does everything in his power to get better leads from his boss, John Williamson, but to no avail. When his coworker Dave Moss comes up with a plan to steal the leads, things get complicated for the tough-talking salesmen.