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Contains very strong language and racism themeWith the notable exception of Glengarry Glen Ross, few of David Mamet's plays have survived the transition from stage to film with their original power and drama intact. So it proves with Edmond, an adaptation of a 1982 one-act by Re-Animator director Stuart Gordon, that is as dreary a talkfest as ever washed up on a cinema screen. A committed performance from Mamet regular William H Macy isn't enough to make this anything more substantial than a repetitive, dyspeptic curio.
Macy is Edmond Burke, a Manhattan businessman who - after a chance encounter with a fortune teller who tells him "You are not where you belong" - heads home to inform his wife (Mamet's own spouse Rebecca Pidgeon) that their marriage is a sham. Heading off into the night, he is preyed upon by pimps, hookers and muggers, before finding an unlikely soulmate in waitress Glenna (Julia Stiles). When their foreplay turns violent, however, this mild-mannered milquetoast ends up wanted for murder.
"FRUSTRATING AND ALIENATING"
Resembling a pretentious art-house version of those yuppie-in-peril movies that were all the rage in the 1980s (After Hours especially comes to mind), Gordon's film ultimately feels as frustrating and alienating as its miserly protagonist. (Everything is "too much" for this whining loser, whether he's ordering a drink from hostess Denise Richards or requesting fellatio from Mena Suvari's whore.) Sticking rigidly to Mamet's patchwork quilt of fleeting, unconnected scenes, meanwhile, the director fails to breathe any sort of life into a piece practically carbon-dated by its flailing assaults on political correctness.
Edmond is out in the UK on 6th July 2007.
