“You are not where you belong,” a gypsy with tarot cards warns the title character of “Edmond.'” She could really be talking to the audience, since they should be doing anything other than watching this horror show.
“Edmond” boils down to a midlife crisis with loads of unnecessary violence. Sick of his job, his wife and his life, Edmond leaves his home and tries to get laid. After haggling over price with three women (yes, it goes on for that long), he gets beat up by street hustlers, buys a knife and proceeds to cut people up – all the while extolling the virtues of the white race.
“Edmond” is an unmitigated mess, which is a surprise, since it was written by David Mamet. A widely appreciated playwright and screenwriter, Mamet has a way with words, and the dialogue in “Edmond” carries many of his signature dialogue: overlapping and high-minded questions. So why is the movie, reworked from Mamet’s own one-act play, reduced to such a disaster?
Is it the inability to feel anything other than revulsion toward the main character?
That’s not too strong a word to describe a man who leaves his wife, goes looking for sex, refuses to pay more than $50 for it, buys a knife and finally slashes a pimp and a waitress.
There’s another telling moment after Edmond verbally abuses a woman on a train simply because she doesn’t answer him. Walking alone with nowhere to go, Edmond breaks down crying until he suddenly comes upon a Baptist Church. Typically, this would be saving-grace time, when the audience embraces Edmond and hopes he sees the error of his ways. Instead, I was worried he was about to attack the minister.
Or maybe the problem was the number of C-list actresses who appear randomly and spout their lines without any sense or feeling. Bai Ling and Denise Richards both play strippers who ask for too much money and Mena Suvari returns to seducing older men. Julia Stiles plays a homophobic waitress who allows Edmond to sleep with her, and gets turned on by the fact that he’s not sure if the pimp he slashed is dead.
The reason the movie really fails is most likely the fact that after every sentence, every action, the constant question is “Why?” Why does Edmond do any of the awful shit he does? Why is every sentence filled with raw hatred? Why is William H. Macy naked? Throwing around racial expletives and talking frankly about sex doesn’t make a movie sophisticated. It just makes it disgusting.
- Mike Hulsebus
- So much rage, so little time.
