Rating of
2.5/4
Unique to say the least.
Drive-In Massacre - wrote on 06/22/11
The 2005 black-comedy/thriller, Edmond is a...unique film to say the least. Directed by Stuart Gordon of Re-Animator and From Beyond fame and written by David Mamet, the viewer gets a movie that is a mix of many very different elements that make up a movie that is almost unlike anything else.
The fact that it was written by the brilliant Mamet was enough for me to want to check it out, and the fact that Stuart Gordon was directing along with an actor like William H. Macy as the title character, I had to check it out, and although the screenplay was originally written in the early-1980s, I think this film is still ahead of its time and many people, including myself, don't know what to think about it. Like all of his work, the dialogue in the movie is some of the most brilliant and provocative ever thought up, the only real problem I have with that aspect of the writing is that it is almost falling into the realm of self-parody; the beats, stuttering, and pausing gets so analytic at points that it seems a bit forced, but that being said, I don't think anybody can do Mamet better than Macy (I would love to see what he could have done in the film version of Glengarry).
In a lot of ways, Edmond is David Mamet's version of Catcher in the Rye, a story with a horrible and mean-spirited protagonist, who does horrible things and you are made to identify with him through out his many encounters during the night. He's a homophobic, racist, sexist man who is filled with rage and yet we are meant to root for him, that's something a viewer simply does not want to do and that's what makes it so unusual, in that respect it reminds me of Devil's Rejects and The Searchers. None of the other people he meets up with are any better either, each encounter is a 1-on-1 scene, Edmond with 1 person and it becomes their movie for 5 minutes or so, he never stays with any character longer than that. Talking to different prostitutes, a pimp, a priest, his wife, a cop, etc. all with a darker-than-dark sense of humor.
So, yes all in all, it's really a movie that is hard to understand. It's unusual to say the least, who knows how this movie will be thought of years from now.
C+
