David Mamet and Stuart Gordon Teamed Up for 2005's Blisteringly Dark Edmond
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Edmond, Stuart Gordon’s evisceratingly bleak 2005 adaptation of David Mamet’s 1982 play of the same name is unforgettably dark and nihilistic. Yet I still managed to forget a fair amount about it.
Before I rewatched it for this column I hadn’t seen Edmond in eighteen years. Eighteen long, long years filled with trauma and disappointment. To paraphrase Matthew McConaughey in Dazed & Confused, that’s what I like about films: I get older but they stay the same.
I did not remember, for example, that Gordon and Mamet, who wrote the screenplay, assembled an all-star trio to play sex workers the utterly loathsome protagonist haggles with in order to get the best possible deal.
I didn’t remember that Denise Richards played an erotic dancer with the profound misfortune to have to interact with the titular monster, who William H. Macy fearlessly plays as someone whose milquetoast demeanor masks a core of pure darkness. I also failed to remember Bai Ling as a peep show worker, Debi Mazar as a woman who works the desk at a bordello or, finally, Mena Suvari as a sex worker who Edmond can’t afford if he has to pay cash and not use an American Express card.
Edmond is a different kind of horror movie. Its horror comes not from vampires, zombies or various things that go bump in the night but rather from mankind’s hideousness and the monster that lies within each of us, waiting to escape its cage and run amok if and when the opportunity presents itself.
Gary Oldman was slated to play the title character in an earlier iteration. Oldman is a fine actor and a chameleon but, like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, he’s so associated in the public mind with playing creeps and weirdoes and larger than life icons of infinite darkness that it would be hard to accept him as a seemingly unassuming white collar worker who discovers the devil within during one very dark night of the soul.
Seeing Macy in a pitch-black adaptation of one of Mamet’s bleakest plays made me think of this particularly obnoxious passage from Doug Hutchison’s odious memoir Flushing Hollywood: “Macy is one of the worst actors of our generation. His performances, to me, are consistently stilted, over-the-top and transparent—as if he’s trying too hard to enunciate every word in that annoying, Mamet-esque staccato style. Simply put: William H. Macy’s a fake. He’s faking it now when he tries talking me out of my shot at Fresh Horses, and he’ll continue faking it over the years with his horse-poop acting.”
Hutchison apparently doesn’t realize that the reason that Macy is partial to the staccato, spare, minimalist style Mamet perfected is because he pioneered that manner of acting in his performance in Mamet plays like Speed-the-Plow, American Buffalo and Oleanna and the Mamet-written films House of Games, Things Change, Wag the Dog, State and Main and Edmond.
Accusing Macy of being a horse poop actor because his delivery is “Mamet-esque” is like panning Paul McCartney because his solo music is “Beatles-esque”
Edmond opens with the title character leaving his white collar job. On a whim he visits a fortune teller whose tarot cards foretell doom. At home he tells his wife (Rebecca Pidgeon) that he is no longer in love with her or sexually or spiritually attracted to her with a complete lack of emotion.
Edmond tells his wife that he’s leaving her immediately as casually as someone else might tell their spouse to remember to take out the trash.
In order to be his truest, most evil self Edmond must first free himself from everything that connects him to the boring, deeply unsatisfying life that he desperately wants to escape.
While drowning his sorrows Edmond encounters a barroom philosopher played by Joe Mantegna who shares his theory that a man needs to have an escape, an outlet, a way of unleashing his id.
Mantegna is nearly as associated with Mamet as Macy is. It is an honor and a pleasure to watch these perfectly matched virtuosos say some of the most vile, disgusting shit you will ever hear in your life.
The bad influence on a bad, bad man gives his new chum the address of a strip club where he can get off but when an exotic dancer played by Denise Richards asks that he buy a one hundred dollar drink in addition to a fifty dollar dance Edmond is put off.
For Edmond, everything is transactional. Women exist for sexual release and he grows quietly and not so quietly enraged when they put a very concrete price on their sexuality that he thinks is too high.
The monsters in this dark fable with no moral and no message are men in all of their ugliness and cruelty but also a capitalist system that puts a price on everything, particularly sex.
Edmond turns down sex with the stripper but he is still a toxic combination of angry and horny so his next stop is a peep show where he becomes apoplectic that a sex worker played by Bai Ling can touch him but he can’t touch her.
This exemplar of toxic, fragile masculinity wants to have sex but he also wants a bargain and he isn’t about to over-pay. That’s true when he visits a brothel where a worker played by Mena Suvari once again informs the angry, horny man that be does not have enough money to have sex with her.
When Edmond very stupidly tries to raise the money via three card monte, the most rigged game in the history of rigged games and he loses, predictably, he becomes enraged and accuses the con men of cheating him.
At this point matters go from bad to much worse. Edmond pawns his wedding ring at a pawn shop and buys a knife.
When a black pimp tries to rob the titular villain he flies into a violent racist rage and repeatedly stabs the man while screaming racist epithets at him.
This, horrifyingly, seems to make Edmond feel more alive than anything he’s ever experienced or could hope to experience. He’s found his calling as a cheap, racist murderer.
Edmond is suddenly so overcome with confidence that he takes home a waitress played by Julia Stiles. At first she seems cute and appealing because she’s played by Julia Stiles but she’s broken and deranged like everyone else in this ugly hellscape.
She doesn’t sleep with Edmond despite being a bigoted, misogynistic sadist; she sleeps with him because he’s a crazed creep but she ends up paying a terrible price for her abysmal judgment.
Jeffrey Combs in a Stuart Gordon movie? It happened!
Edmond just keep sinking lower and lower until he’s descending further and further into the circles of hell and cannot sink any lower.
Edmond is a nasty piece of work. It’s almost too dark even to function as the blackest of black comedies. It is a bracing, uncompromising psychodrama about the awfulness of men and the insidious pervasiveness of violent racism.
Gordon and Mamet teamed up for the ultimate feel-bad bummer but if you’re willing to endure a harrowing gauntlet of ugliness (and who isn’t?) Edmond is an absolutely riveting exploration of one man’s descent into an bottomless moral abyss and the poisonous culture that creates ghouls like him.
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