US | 2005 | Directed by Stuart Gordon
Logline: A frustrated white-collar married man descends into his own personal hell on the streets of New York City.
Edmond (William H. Macy) leaves his office job in a blue funk. An impulse decision leads him to having his Tarot cards read, and it’s not a pretty picture. “You don’t belong here,” warns the fortuneteller. Later, in his apartment, he cruelly dismisses his wife (Rebecca Pidgeon), and walks out on her, much to her shock and then disgust. At a bar he’s told by another suit (Joe Mantegna) that he needs to get laid, and so begins Edmond’s dark journey of fear and loathing.
Finding a sexual release proves more difficult than the barfly had suggested; he’s thrown out of a strip club, walks out of a peep show, and is refused at a brothel, all for protesting at the prices he’s expected to pay for instant gratification. Then he’s conned by a card shark on the street, and when he kicks up a fuss, the two men take him into an alleyway where they beat and rob him. Yup, Murphy’s Law rules.
Finally he cracks when a pimp cajoles him and attempts to trick him out of the cash he’s just got from pawning his wedding ring (which he was intending to use back at the brothel. His violent eruption transforms him into something more base and animalistic, almost a Jekyll and Hyde syndrome at play. His retaliation on the Negro pimp seemingly empowers him. He chats up a diner waitress (Julia Stiles), and she sleeps with him and listens intently to his knife-brandishing, adrenalin-pumped, racist diatribes.
Edmond is a kind of roving chamber piece – a sociopathic case study – loitering in the wilderness of the urban nightmare. Written by David Mamet, and based on an early play, it seems like odd fare for director Gordon, most famously known for his hell-for-leather adaptations of Lovecraft, but, in fact, Gordon began in theatre, and it was his Organic Theater staging of Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago that launched the playwright’s career. Gordon first saw Edmond performed in 1982 and had wanted to turn into a film for twenty years.
The subject matter is more than a little difficult, ripe as ever, as we follow an angry, bigoted man toiling in his own misery, hatred and confusion. Xenophobia is one of the central themes, tackling racism and sexism, paranoia, anxiety, and despair. But buried deep is the search for self-love, for resignation and understanding. Bittersweet irony eventually comes to embrace Edmond, to show him the light of emancipation.
Imagine Taxi Driver and After Hours, but without any of the cinematic verve, and this isn’t Mamet’s best work by a long shot, but it tackles the kind of portrayal many American filmmakers have shied away from in the past because the darkness is too oppressive. Gordon elicits excellent work from his cast, especially Macy who is in virtually every scene, and Stiles is terrific, but also Bokeem Woodbine as a prison cell mate, Denise Richards (b-girl hostess), Bai Ling (peep show performer), Mena Suvari (prostitute), and in even smaller roles, Debi Mazar as a brothel receptionist, George Wendt as pawn shop owner, Dylan Walsh as a detective, an hilarious turn from Jeffrey Combs as a camp, disgruntled, finger-lickin’ clerk, and not forgetting Mamet regulars Mantegna and Pidgeon.
Edmond deals with its confronting themes of fear and desire with a pitch-black sense of humour, snaking in and around Macy’s foul-mouthed central performance, coiling and lurching like Mike Leigh’s Naked. It’s a dark, dark parable of angst, identity crisis, and a kind of perverted redemption. Not an easy pill to swallow, especially with Mamet’s penchant for stilted verbosity, but it’s definitely a portrait that needs re-assessing.