MOVIE REVIEW: Edmond

William H. Macy plays the eponymous Edmond in Stuart Gordon’s film based on a play by David Mamet, who also provides the screenplay. Edmond Burke is disillusioned. On a Friday night, on his way home from work, he stops at a fortune-teller and has his tarot cards read. “You are not where you belong,” she tells Edmond after flipping from the deck. Edmond goes home, has dinner and tells his wife (Rebecca Pidgeon) he doesn’t love her. Then he leaves her.

What follows is an urban horror nightmare that is sometimes funny and almost macabre. First, Edmond heads to a bar where he meets an angry Joe Mantegna, who rails about white emasculation and tells Edmond that all he needs is to get laid, which sets the stage for Edmond’s new enlightenment. From there he heads to a strip club, a peep show, then a massage parlor, has a run in with three-card Monte dealers and later a pimp. Stopping at a bar after all this he picks up the waitress (Julia Stiles) and goes back to her house. Through all these encounters there’s a simmering of anguish that leads to a nonsensical exclamation of his new guiding philosophy, which ends with an act of brutality that is as sudden as it is inevitable.

Macy is arresting as Edmond. He occupies every scene and the bulk of the dialogue. Every second his face registers a different emotion: from confusion to resignation but never understanding. Edmond now knows where he doesn’t belong, but he has no idea where he should be. He also cannot let go of where he was. From his complete gullibility in falling for the three-card Monte game or his haggling every step of the way with each potential sexual encounter, Edmond gauges this new world with the mindset of his old. His own bafflement and pointless new theories keeps the audience at arm’s length of even remotely empathizing with him. There is no promise of fulfillment. It’s the thoughtless wanderings of a man running on empty. His path begins cautiously then turns desperate, as he becomes a victim of urban predators, to ugly as he relishes his conquests.

The film loses some momentum, as the night ends and Edmond must face the ramifications of his actions. But Macy carries the film and provides a provocative and ugly tapestry that is jarring and decayed. It resonates in the way the best of Mamet does: the cadence of the dialouge adds a weight to the words and actions that chill us by their potential of what happens when simmering disappointment reaches its boiling point.

In the end, recalling the words of the fortune-teller that began this, one wonders if Edmond is now really where he belongs or if he was there all along merely exchanging his old cell for a new cell.

An added bonus to last night’s viewing was that both William H. Macy and Stuart Gordon were on hand for the show. In a short introduction, they hinted at the long, tiring time they had trying to finance the movie (the movie itself was shot in 16 days). Gordon said, “Hollywood is terrified of this movie.” Macy quipped, in referring to the 27 producers the film has, that instead of one person giving them a million dollars, they found a million people to each provide a dollar. I don’t know much about the ways of financing a movie, but a movie that has William H. Macy, Denise Richards, Julia Stiles and Joe Mantegna and a screenplay by David Mamet shouldn’t have that much trouble raising money should it? Obviously, it’s not a mainstream movie, but shouldn’t a well-acted, well-written, well-directed movie get more support than avoidance? Or am I just being naïve?