28 out of 35 people found the following review helpful:
Edmond
SAI81 from from Tonbridge,
9th September, 2007
David Mamet is a great writer, but even a great writer has his off days and watching Edmond is like watching Mamet vigorously scrape the bottom of the barrel. The script is a disaster, it's incredibly stagey in its tone; none of the characters talk, they soliliquise, taking forever to say something thuddingly obvious. The whole thing also feels disjointed because only Macy (who is in almost every frame of the picture) appears for more than 10 minutes of screentime and even the long, increasingly dark, night that we spend with Edmond as he becomes more and more unhinged never stops feeling like a bunch of scenes being acted (in Macy's case extremely well acted) at us. The actors do, largely, make the best of it with Macy giving a tour de force performance that deserves a better movie to be in, Stiles showing that when you give her something to do in a picture she can act up a storm and Mrs Mamet Rebecca Pidgeon (who really ought to do more outside her husband's films) impressing in a couple of brief scenes. Try as they might though they can't fashion a silk purse from this sow's ear. Gordon's direction is largely perfunctory, coming briefly alive in the violent sequences which are executed with the panache you'd expect from the director of Re-Animator but it all comes back to the screenplay which feels like nothing so much as a mirthless, nihilistic, riff on American Psycho.
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