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| Images courtesy of MVD Visual |
Actor William H. Macy and playwright/screenwriter/director
David Mamet go way back as far as teaming up together for some of the most
provocative and incendiary stage plays written and performed in the history of
live theater. Beginning with their first
collaboration in the 1991 crime drama Homicide to the sexual harassment
drama Oleanna in 1994 and again in 2004 with the human
trafficking thriller Spartan, Macy and Mamet formed a bold, confident
and daring actor-director team of sorts and took audiences on stage and in film
through some dark and morally complex places that posed more uncomfortable
questions than it answered.
Which brings us to Mamet’s 1982 one-act play Edmond,
a kind of lost weekend downward spiral story involving a white-collar worker
named Edmond Burke in New York City.
After a chance meeting with a fortune teller, Edmond slips into
existential crisis, leaves his wife and finds himself on an increasingly
self-destructive odyssey through the underbelly of the city that never sleeps. Brushing alongside greedy prostitutes,
violent pimps and street conmen, the titular character is eventually beaten and
left for dead but not before buying a knife and proceeding to commit racist
hate crimes against African American citizens.
Exhilarated by his newfound brush with violence, he picks up a waitress
named Glenna for a one-night stand which goes horribly awry, sending the
titular antihero further down the spiral with the looming threat of
incarceration and some dogged measure of redemption however ugly.
An existential horror story rife with racism, violence and
murder, in stage play form the episodic journey consisted of twenty-three
disparate short scenes with the cast members taking on multiple roles
throughout the narrative. Hard on the
eyes and especially the ears with brutal ethnic slurs, the play like Oleanna
was a confrontational exercise in experimental thrust theater designed to
unseat the audience from their comfort zones.
Understandably, the racial content of the piece, however critically
acclaimed, made it difficult for college campuses to stage the work. As far as any kind of film adaptation goes, Edmond
went unmade onscreen for decades despite Mamet’s own ascension into film
directing as well as screenwriting for other directors.
Enter cult horror filmmaker, theater director, screenwriter
and playwright Stuart Gordon who with Brian Yuzna helped conjure up some of the
most memorable adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft the silver screen has seen from Re-Animator
to From Beyond and Dagon to delivering two of Empire
Pictures’ most memorable offerings with Dolls and Robot Jox. Usually effects heavy and boundary pushing,
the director like other horror contemporaries David Cronenberg and John
Carpenter worked almost exclusively within the horror subgenre. In other words, a staple of specifically
1980s horror. But near the end of the
horror director’s career on his very last two projects, Gordon sought to get
back in touch with his Organic Theater Company roots and with David Mamet’s
screen treatment of his own play the two teamed up for what would be the fourth
screen collaboration of Mamet and his favorite actor William H. Macy.
Edmond as a film finds William
H. Macy in the role of Edmond Burke as he episodically encounters everyone from
recurring Mamet collaborator Joe Mantegna, a fortune teller played by David
Lynch regular Frances Bay, strippers played by Denise Richards, Bai Ling, Debi
Mazar and Mena Suvari in sneaky cameos including but not limited to Re-Animator
star Jeffrey Combs as a desk clerk.
Where the film starts to boil down centers around a chance encounter
with a waitress studying theater played by Julia Stiles and later a prisoner
played by Bokeem Woodbine who kind of brings the saga full circle for our
racist antihero in existential crisis.
Visually the film looks fine and has the feel of a night
life thriller ala Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, shot handsomely by But
I’m a Cheerleader cinematographer Denis Maloney and the jazzy soundtrack by
Bobby Johnston suits the urban city setting very well. Co-producer Lionel Mark Smith who played the
role of a thuggish pimp in the stage play reprises his role here in arguably
the film’s most difficult scene which reportedly caught the unwanted ear of
Jamie Foxx who was shooting a television pilot nearby. Despite being an ensemble piece with many fleeting
characters coming in and out of the story, Edmond primarily rests on the
shoulders of its sociopathic protagonist played brilliantly by William H. Macy
who won the Best Actor award at the 2006 Mar del Plata Film Festival.
Given a miniscule limited theatrical run by First
Independent Pictures before languishing on the shelves of Blockbuster Video
straight-to-video rental sections, Edmond the film didn’t quite take off
with moviegoers in the same way it did on stage. William H. Macy is great in the piece and
knows how to work with Mamet while Stuart Gordon gets back in touch with his
theatrical background but while the play implicated the spectator in some way,
on film it plays as a character study where we can divorce ourselves somewhat
from the performances analytically. The
same can be said of how Oleanna worked on stage compared to how it played
in cinematic form.
Thankfully now in a new blu-ray special edition from the MVD
Marquee Collection including but not limited to two audio commentaries by David
Mamet and Stuart Gordon alongside producer Lionel Mark Smith, deleted scenes
and a vintage making-of press kit, cult filmgoers interested in all things
Mamet related as well as horror fans keen on seeing Gordon working outside of
his comfort zone now have a chance to assess this still thorny and blistering
descent into Hell for themselves. Every
bit as potent and discomforting now as it was in 2005, Edmond isn’t
necessarily the definitive Macy-Mamet collaboration but it does give the viewer
with difficult provocations to ponder long after the end credits roll. If nothing else you have to hand it to Macy
for so fearlessly bringing to life such a complete monster to the silver
screen.
--Andrew Kotwicki
