Edmond
Tags: murder, cult, philosophical, violence

Plot synopsis:
Edmond Burke is a middle-aged Seattle businessman who visits a tarot fortune teller on the way home. She claims Edmond "is not where [he] belongs." He decides to make changes in his life, beginning by leaving his wife. At a bar, Edmond tells a fellow patron he hasn't had sex in a while and that marriage took away his masculinity. The man gives him the address to a strip club, where Edmond is kicked out by a bouncer for not paying for a stripper's drink. Now even more sexually frustrated, Edmond goes to a peep show; having never been to such a place before, he is disappointed when he realizes that he isn't allowed to have actual sex with the performer.
Next he goes to a white-collar bordello, but can't afford a hooker. Edmond needs money, so he plays a three-card Monte game with a street dealer. When Edmond accuses the dealer of cheating, the dealer and his shill beat him up and steal his money. Edmond becomes enraged by what he sees as the contempt, prejudice and greed of society. He pawns his wedding ring in exchange for a knife. He is approached by a pimp who offers Edmond a "clean girl" and lures him to an alleyway, where the pimp attempts to mug him. In a wild rage, Edmond attacks the pimp with his knife while hurling racial slurs at him. He leaves him wounded and possibly dying in the alley.
Suddenly euphoric, Edmond enters a coffee shop and tells a young waitress, Glenna, his newfound worldview of instant gratification. They end up having sex at her apartment. Glenna likes him at first, but she is soon frightened by his increasingly erratic behavior and calls for help. An enraged Edmond slashes her to death, blaming her own insecurity for her murder. On a subway train, he has an angry confrontation with a female passenger. Edmond comes across a church service where a minister preaches about respect and faith. Edmond feels the urge to preach about his own experiences, and as he stands in the doorway of the church, the woman from the subway recognizes him and calls into the street for the police. The responding officer pats Edmond down to find the knife in his front jacket pocket. Edmond is arrested.
In jail, Edmond begins to appreciate the security of his old life, but it is too late; the police have reason to believe that the knife found in Edmond's pocket may be the weapon used in Glenna's murder. The interrogating officer bluntly asks Edmond why he killed Glenna, to Edmond's shock and disbelief. He is sent to prison for her murder. There, Edmond is paired with a black cellmate. He likes prison because it is simple. He speaks of how he has always feared black people, but now that he shares a room with one, he can finally feel a bond. The indifferent cellmate then forces Edmond to perform oral sex on him. Edmond tells a prison minister what happened, but goes off on a tangent, shouting that God has been unfair to him. When the minister asks why he murdered the waitress, he has no answer.
Years pass. Edmond has cut connections with the outside world, refusing to see visitors. He talks to his cellmate, with whom he has developed a friendly relationship, about the human ego and how life should not be taken for granted. He concludes that by conquering his fears, he might lead a better life. Both men ponder the afterlife. Edmond then goes to sleep comfortably alongside his cellmate. True to the tarot fortune teller's words, Edmond might well have found the place where he belongs.

Review: At first glance, horror meister Stuart Gordon would not seem the obvious choice to direct an emotional psycho-drama cinematic rendering of a David Mamet play, yet with Edmond, he displays a deft touch for the material and allows the actors to carry the day.Originally penned as a stage play, Edmond tells the story of namesake Edmond Burke (William H.
From there he begins a slow spiral into depravity and insanity that begins with telling his wife he's leaving her and progresses to an outback-like dreamwalk into New York City's seedy underbelly of bars pimps and prostitutes.Written in the wake of a divorce, Mamet infuses the script with racial discourse and epithets that are stunning in their caustic vulgarity as Edmond pours out years of pent up hatred on one of his muggers revealing a window into his shallow soul that only becomes more intensely evident as the movie reaches its conclusion.In the scene where Edmond tells his wife their marriage is over, he explains to her that she hasn't satisfied him spiritually or emotionally for quite some time.
Yet, after watching his progression trough the course of the story, it becomes clear that spiritually he has no soul, and emotionally he's a shallow but volatile cauldron of disjointed thoughts.The film is a tour-de-force for Macy, who is in every scene and morphs from a character of Caspar Milquetoast proportions to unhinged bigoted psychopath and back again by the movie's end.
As if in a wink and nudge to his own work, Gordon even manages to insinuate longtime stalwart Jeffrey Combs into a small but telling scene during Edmond's descent into insanity.By the time Edmond arrives at the end of that journey, however; at that place where he ought to be; I couldn't help but think he had merely wasted his life catching up to where his soul was long ago..
Macy's life begins to unravel, and he ends up falling into an urban hell where he encounters and sometimes gets rough with, or roughed up by, various seedy characters (this is supposed to be New York, but was shot in Hollywood).
Much like Mamet's Oleanna, also based on his own play, Edmond features a tour de force performance from lead actor and real life friend William H.
You have not seen a crisis of identity lead a man to the depths of the hell within himself like you do here.Gordon shoots the film with a bit of an off-kilter unease, showing the audience how fragile each moment is.
Where that trail ends may be surprising and also fitting at the same time, but if nothing else, it is the place he has been searching for his entire life.This is definitely Macy, Mamet, and Gordon's film, but it wouldn't be as successful as it is without an abundance of name actors in extremely small roles helping to keep the adventure going.
Mamet's wife Rebecca Pidgeon is great as always playing the wife Macy leaves; Mena Suvari and Julia Stiles are believable as two of the women he crosses paths with, both of whom are introduced as one thing but eventually allow their true colors to come through; and Joe Mantegna once again shows that he became an actor only to show the world how Mamet's words should be spoken.
The first time I watched it alone and found I missed a lot of important dialog and imagery that was crucial to the story because I was thinking about the previous scene...so when the end hit me, I found my head was spinning and I couldn't believe what I was seeing and thought I must have missed something.
For a film that approaches a gritty New York night with style and ease, with a scriptwriter as esteemed and knowledgeable as David Mamet, it was a shame to see some of the later scenes become a pulpit for Mr. Mamet to talk through instead of more subtle suggestion, but it is still far from making this movie avoidable.
With some of William H Macy's most powerful work, Edmond is still a triumph of a character based thriller, leaving me satisfied with it's profound conclusion..
A frightening expose' of madness, Edmond is one of those rare stories to come along in a long time that actually shows us a man's downfall with the straightforward horror and self-humiliation that Macy displays.
I wasn't really sure what to expect of this film going into it; it sounded nothing like the gory horror movies that Stuart Gordon made his name with, and I had little faith for him branching out after seeing the disappointing King of the Ants.
It may be presumptuous to say that this is similar to the great film Crash, but it deals with the same themes of prejudice and intolerance.Stuart Gordon (Re-Animator, Body Snatchers) takes a David Maumet (Ronin, Wag the Dog) play and has a stellar cast led by William H.
In a bravura performance he embodies the strange creature created by David Mamet, triumphs in the extended monologues that include hate, racism, homophobia, hopelessness, and fear and serves them up in a near stoic way that allows the viewer to accompany the dissociating man into the depths of hell - but with an absolutely solid ending.
It may not be an easy movie to watch, but it is clearly one actor's tour de force that deserves attention.Edmond (Macy) is a bored, frustrated, angry robot of a worker who happens on a fortune teller who reads his Tarot cards and tells him he is in the wrong place.
As he ultimately finds his prison cell the only place of rest he can tolerate, in comes a cellmate (African American of course) and after an abusive start, Edmond shaves his head, gets tattooed and the story closes in a rather tender fashion.The cast is superb: the vignettes of the characters Edmond encounters include Mena Suvari, Julia Stiles, Bokeem Woodbine, Rebecca Pidgeon, along with other less well known but equally fine actors.
Stuart Gordon directs Mamet's play-to-film story with the right amount of bluntness and dark, smarmy street situations.
Now, I know you'd be a rich person if you had a dime for every time someone said that about a movie, but Macy's performance as Edmond Burke, your typical, upper-middle-class white business man who goes over the deep end and delves further and further into it as the film develops, is so good that if you didn't know any better you probably wouldn't think the guy was acting.
I saw the high rating, read a couple of reviews and decided to spend my time watching this movie.Needless to say, I feel compelled to warn other people that this film is so overrated and has so many 'what the heck?' moments that you walk out completely baffled.Predictable - Could the fortune teller draw any more cards with swords?
The main character is supposed to be 47 but he looks like he is 57 years old.He acts as he has never been on the street before.Never been to the whores.Too bad,if money is an issue.And all those tricky card games are so hard to figure out especially when rigged.Is this the kind of guy who would somehow manage to get a pretty waitress in bed with him?They are sometimes artistic,but they never do such blatant mistakes.The street has its charms ,sometimes, but the idiots get punished.If you have to would punish some idiot what would you advise?Sodomy?Of course.Sodomy seems to be the fate that awaits those who are leaving their wives in order to wander the streets at night.Stay with your wife,or get sodomized,is the rule for the 57 years old idiots..
The story, courtesy of David Mamet, is comparable to both "After Hours" (less the comedy) and "Falling Down", only the nightly odyssey of this film's protagonist takes place in New York's red light districts and decaying alleys.
MACY for at least trying to get inside the poorly developed character shown here and make this poor soul believable.He's a middle-aged business man who isn't savvy enough to recognize a phony card game when he sees it even when a stranger gives him a clue, nor realize that he's being taken for a sap by would-be robbers in back alleys just waiting to pull out a knife or peep show personnel looking for an easy buck.
He's dull to the extreme and yet spouts a lot of psycho-babble talk that is supposed to explain his character.The only really intense scene and well-played scene is between Macy and JULIA STYLES as a luckless waitress foolish enough to invite him home after he's already exhibited a dangerously off kilter mind and bragged about killing a man.But overall, it's more like a cheap exploitation film that gets real bloody once Macy loses his cool and rages against society's manipulations.
It's a familiar refrain, the alienation of the psyche, done to death by a succession of philosophers and social scientists since the time of the ancient Greeks.This specific type of film has also been done before, in a fashion, with Falling Down (1993), a film which also exploits the violence that lies beneath civilization's veneer of genteel respectability and sociability.In short, as we begin to look over Edmond's shoulder, we find out he's about to explore and explode, all on one night, when he decides he needs more stimulation than he's been getting at home, on the job or wherever.
Falling Down, in contrast, is 113 minutes, allowing for more back story and character development; besides, as a film, Falling Down worked better, I think, as an exposition of one man's mental anguish and his response to adversity.Hence, Edmond is a deceit, in a sense.
He isn't nuts...just a person who decides he is going to change himself and everyone else all at once...only to find out, most people live in their own lanes and have their reasons for being that way...the underbelly side of NYC is the conduit that defines the notion that everyone is different, some good, some bad...Edmond becomes trapped in that lane and won't get out until he is vindicated on his terms...which spirals out of control.
"Edmond" is a good and very interesting film from writer David Mamet (adapted from his one-act play) and, amazingly, director Stuart Gordon (who made two of my favourite schlock horror films of all time - "Re-Animator" and "From Beyond" - and nothing of consequence that I have seen, ever since).
Mamet favourite Joe Mantegna, Gordon favourite Jeffery Combs, Denise Richards, the Goddess Julia Stiles, Mena Suvari, Debi Mazar, Dulé Hill, et al.Not a film for everybody, but I thought it was great.I'm not too sure about Edmond's image choices by the end of the film, though..
At the end of the day, making this film from a play and then note really creating no subplots or diversion such as full characters gives us the feeling were watching a play but it also shows that Mamet was too lazy to update his play into a movie.
I had a lot of interest in watching Edmond because it represented the collaboration between Stuart Gordon(director)and David Mamet(writer),two excellent filmmakers who have their beginnings in the theater.The combination between them was mediocre and not nearly as good as I expected.Mamet may not be very famous as a director,but he is as a screenwriter and playwright.He usually puts in his works great dialogs and a perfect characterization of the characters.In Edmond,he changed brilliant dialogs for cheap psychology.Gordon is known for being the director of excellent horror films(Re-Animator and From Beyond)and he has a beginning in the experimental theater.In Edmond,his precise direction cannot rescue a too simple story.The film starts very well but,after that,it looses force.I would have preferred in Edmond a deeper message and more intelligent drama.Edmond is an interesting movie but it is not totally satisfactory.Maybe,my expectations were too high because of Mamet's and Gordon's brilliant work in various previous movies,and I could not totally enjoy it.I can slightyl recommend it as an moderately interesting movie but not very satisfactory..
Playing like a more philosophical version of FALLING DOWN (1993) but done on a more intimate scale, this character drama resolves itself into a series of interesting vignettes where a good cast is allowed to leave its mark: David Mamet (who wrote the script, based on his own play) regular Joe Mantegna and a surprising amount of female roles (including, as is his fashion, one for Mamet's wife Rebecca Pidgeon) - with the most impressive, perhaps, being Mena Suvari (as a high-class hooker) and Julia Stiles (as an aspiring actress doubling as a waitress).
Always great dialogue from Mamet, a play Gordon has been trying to bring to the silver screen for years.If your into edgy dramas like American History X, then I think you will like Edmond.
One of the the best character-driven movies of 2006 (released in 2005), Edmond projects a sensational performance by William Macy that goes more deeply into the human psyche and mental and ephemeral glimpses of the raw, gritty, and brutal individual destruction possible.
This movie may be some 3rd year film maker's dream, and may speak to some people who applaud Macy for his acting or Mamet for his brave dialogue, or an array of other actors for their brave performances, but as a film it fails..
Unlike Falling Down this movie actually portrays a character, Edmond, which could exist in real life, and we understand what motivates him.
As the night progresses, years of social conditioning are slowly stripped away, revealing pent-up anger, resentment and bigotry, leading Edmond on a downward spiral that ends in madness and murder.For much of the time, Stuart Gordon's Edmond is like Joel Schumacher's Falling Down blessed with the dark fairy-tale vibe of After Hours, reason enough to seek out this brave and disturbing film from one of America's best 'unsung' directors.
Sadly, this unique atmosphere is not carried through to the final credits: although the night-time scenes leading up to the murder are quite mesmerising, with stylish direction from Gordon, a bravura central performance from Macy, and excellent turns from a talented supporting cast, the film loses momentum towards the end, eventually buckling under the weight of writer David Mamet's awkward philosophising (something which belies the theatrical origins of the work).Still, the complexity of the plot and depth of the characters means that there is plenty to chew over after the film has finished, for those who enjoy that kind of thing: is our destiny pre-ordained; why does Edmond continually haggle over cash (especially when it involves having sex with Denise Richards or Mena Suvari); what is the relevance of the number 115; would you 'get on his body'?
While I have no interest in talking poorly about writer David Mamet, this film is much like "Falling Down" with Michael Douglas, another white-collar man who goes through a mental break.
In fact, Edmond's original text has existed since the early 1980s at which time it was a David Mamet play, meaning that director Stuart Gordon has transformed Edmond to the screen very impressively; incorporating the necessary feel; atmosphere and cinematography.The film carries that same temperament American Psycho had in it being a piece that looks at identity within a capitalist driven world, which is then filtered through a close to psychotic perspective.
Other characters come and go but all are well portrayed.When the film ended, I realized that I did not move a bit and never wondered what time it was.There are movies I dream the night I see them.
Edmond might deal with horrific things, but it's not Re-Animator.Edmond would work as a short film; it's an excellent play, but I don't even really like Mamet's screenplay for the film--it goes on and on way past the point it should, though again this may be my problem with Gordon's direction.
David Mamet's play "Edmond" becomes on the hands of the "Re-Animator" director Stuart Gordon a strange portrayal about human degradation and the loss of everything, a man who lost everything and most important, his inner self into sex, crimes, lies and more; a man who went spiraling out of control believing this was the path he should be traveling by.
Macy playing Edmond does almost the same except this time his disenchanted character leaves his wife and his house, he doesn't love her anymore and he wants something new, something exciting in his life.
The film isn't fair with us by showing Edmond became the way he did; it isn't fair also because he barely realizes that his life was full of good things, it simply throws to us that he hated how the world was like, hated his wife and all.
Perhaps the plot was going way absurd or the way the scene was edited, something happened to me during this part; the plot twists to some bizarre things that to some might look ridiculous; another thing that bothers concerns about Edmond's racist attacks, it goes way too much, less could work effectively, and is something that shouldn't be here if the movie seems to demand from us that we like this guy (and we do, no matter what because William H.
Macy.But the thing with this movie (which is adapted from a play as I read after I watched it), is that you never really can sympathize with it's main character.
Macy director Stuart Gordon claim that Edmond does not, at any point in the film, go crazy.
Edmond (2005) *** 1/2 (out of 4) David Mamet adapted his own play about a lonely man (William H.
You can look at the box office records and the fact that the movie never played in over five theaters to see that this isn't going to be for everyone but if you like a strange and surreal character study then this one offers a lot of great things..
Macy is "Edmond", a man who comes to the conclusion that his life has been a terrible waste and it's time he did something about it.