At first glance, Edmond seems an unlikely combination of director and writer. Stuart Gordon is a genre director famous for beloved but lurid H.P. Lovecraft adaptations in the 1980s and sci-fi B movies in the 90s such as Robot Jox and Space Truckers. David Mamet on the other hand is an award winning playwright whose films about conmen have attracted A list casts and are revered for their idiosyncratic dialogue. At the risk of being churlish, Mamet’s dip into grand Guignol with his screenplay for Ridley Scott’s over blown Hannibal may have given him appreciation for better horror directors and as William H Macy has appeared in six previous Mamet adaptations it’s no surprise to see him in the lead. However the connection goes deeper than that as Gordon actually directed Mamet plays on stage in the 1970s, so it’s fitting that their careers have dovetailed again after Gordon’s recent and underrated thriller King of the ants, which saw him tackling non-fantasy themes of masculinity.
In this film William H plays a middle-aged man whose life crisis has just hit. He dumps his wife and explores New York’s seedy underworld looking for some kind of gratification. This covers much of the same ground as Taxi Driver and indeed the rough cut of Edmond used some of Bernard Hermann’s cues in its soundtrack, but while Travis Bickle believed himself to be some sort of amoral avenging angel, Macy plays another down at heel loser of the kind he’s successfully and endearingly made a career from.
Ripped off by card sharks, beaten up by a pimp and increasingly psychotic, Edmond’s journey isn’t a cheery one by anyone’s standards. Various familiar faces cross his path (as you might expect from any Mamet project) from Joe Mantegna to George Wendt, Denise Richards to Meni Suvari offering life advice and words of wisdom, however things progressively go wrong as he ends up with blood literally on his hands and no sign of his libido being sated.
Like another film released this month (Taxidermia), as a twisted tale of the desire of Western males to do and say the unthinkable, this film is still surprisingly shocking twenty five years after the play was first performed, even in a year that has seen various torture porn movies released. Edmond uses incredibly racist language (as a cathartic release for the character, perhaps) and demonstrates why you should never gesticulate using a knife. However, this is ironically not a tragedy (at least for the lead character) as it perfectly follows the hero’s path as depicted in classical comedy, which is to say he starts out happy, goes on a journey that is as bleak as you like and then ends up happy again at the finale – with a tragedy defined as the reverse. While the place Edmond is meant to be – according to the fortune teller at the beginning of his journey - may be one construed as a slightly sick punchline to the previous brisk hour and twenty minutes, it’s a finale that works and if it’s one that makes the more conservative elements of the audience shudder, so much the better.
With great performances all round and pithy dialogue, this is a terrific modern American morality tale. A little Mamet goes a long way and I hope this gives the director more work in the mainstream even if I’m secretly pleased as punch that he may be making House of Re-animator (with Macy as the undead President of 'the free world') in the not too distant future.

Listen to my interview with the director