Edmond
A disaffected businessman journeys into the underbelly of New York to confront his demons. William H Macy stars in this adaptation of David Mamet's play
No one plays a nebbish like William H Macy. From Fargo to Boogie Nights to Wild Hogs, if you want someone to be duped, cuckolded, emasculated or humiliated, Macy's your one-man bad luck charm. His baleful, wounded eyes, bleating delivery and narrow-shouldered physique evokes a lifetime of last places. A fine actor, he's also capable of much more, notably in his longtime collaboration with esteemed writer David Mamet. So if you need someone to play Mamet's own ultimate loser, for once, Macy surely comes in first. His Edmond Burke is a seething cauldron of impotence and ignorance, hating his white-collar office job, resenting his wife (Pidgeon) and fearful of women, blacks and homosexuals. Inspired by an encounter with a fortune-teller, Edmond decides enough is enough. Fleeing his wife, he heads straight into New York's urban jungle, seemingly easy prey for the con men, pimps and hookers. But when Edmond takes brutal revenge on a knife-wielding hustler, the exhilarating empowerment he feels can only be expressed through more violence, leading to murder, capture and resignation to a fate that his old self would have considered worse than death. It's no surprise that Mamet's 1982 stage play took nearly a quarter of a century to become a feature film. All the trademark terse, mannered dialogue, employed as much for its aural rhythm as for the actual words, is present and politically incorrect and even today, repressed WASP Edmond's scabrous, foul-mouthed tirades still sting. Macy relishes his chance to go from pitiful victim to terrifying aggressor and back again, backed by a cast of Mamet regulars (Mantegna, Stiles, his wife Rebecca Pidgeon). It's deliberately provocative material, where every worst fear is realized, every worst impulse acted on. Edmond's episodic descent into hell would be unbearably depressing if it wasn't also shot through with a wicked black humour. Although not everyone will laugh when exchanges like "I don't feel like a man"; "You need to get laid" - are taken to their blackly ironic conclusion. The main reason for the reluctance to bring Edmond to the screen, though, may lie more with the fact that, on the Mamet-o-meter, it ranks a fair way behind classics like American Buffalo, Oleanna or Glengarry Glen Ross. Though constructed as a series of duologues, Edmond's escalating hysteria dominates the exchanges so much that it may as well be a monologue. Mamet's best work thrives on the cut and thrust of two antagonistic voices that this work often misses. Verdict Macy is on top form and Mamet fans will savour the vicious barbs of repressed male rage but many will find this is a claustrophobic, stagey exercise without the wit and scope of Glengarry Glen Ross. |
