Edmond [USA, 2006]

This film is adapted from a play that David Mamet wrote twenty years ago so I won’t actually accuse him of plagiarizing such films as “Falling Down” and “The Company of Men”.  This film is in fact, totally Mamet, with all of his usual stagey dialogue and his depiction of a world that is absolute and complete in its demented version of reality.  In “Alice in Wonderland” I buy that, but here Mamet is trying to depict the real world and a character whom we are led to assume has been soaking up its grime like a sponge for years and years.  That is, until one night when out of the blue the hand of fate proverbially squeezes him and purges ‘bad Edmond’ out from what we must assume was up until then ‘good Edmond’.  Maybe this worked on the stage.  The stage does create contained and absolute worlds like that.  But watching Bill Macy walking around the city as if he really was following Mamet’s invisible carrot-on-a-stick does not work.  The real world has all sorts of people, but in Mamet’s world, they all behave the way Mamet wants them to. 

The thing that Mamet’s film has in common with those films in listed above is that the ‘protagonist’ Edmond is full of hate, and he wears his racism and misogyny on his sleeve.  But there’s something unsettling in Mamet’s film that is different from those other unsettling movies.  In Mamet’s film, indeed every black man is going to rob you and beat you up or threaten to kill you.  The black men in this film have to; otherwise Edmond cannot go down to the depths that Mamet needs him to go to.  Same for the female characters who all feign their interest in Edmond so they can get what they want (money, ‘obviously’).  The one woman who apparently seems to like Edmond, turns out to be what we can only guess is just like his wife; she doesn’t ‘listen to him’ or understand him.  The film’s biggest mess is this female character because given that Bill Macy is no George Clooney, there’s absolutely no way that this very attractive young woman would bring home a crazy-talking stranger, much less have sex with him.   Her character also conveniently has a dark side and a naiveté that is dumb enough to argue with him while he’s waving a knife in the air that looks like a prop from “Friday the 13th”.   But in Mamet’s world, such silly women exist. 

The sad thing is; there are kernels of truth in this flick that in the hands of a good screenwriter might have made the whole thing work.  The film’s theme “each man loves what he fears” is an intriguing one, but the film shies away from ever really nailing that fear, instead going for video game techniques (antagonists seem to pop up everywhere), or black humor.  In a film like this, humor is yet another obstacle for creating a divide between Edmund and us in the audience.  All of us have rage and prejudice at times, but Mamet lets the audience off the hook by pushing Edmond to an extreme that we know in all actuality we will never reach. 

At the end of the day, this film is just a character study, which isn’t too bad since Macy does his usual excellent job. It’s good as ‘entertainment’; the ending is tied up nice and neat so we don’t have to endure any emotional stress or self-reflection when it’s over.  But personally, if a film professes to be challenging, I prefer that it doesn’t demand that we leave our intelligence aside or bother awakening our souls. 
My grade:  5