The film Edmond, a selection for the Venice Film Festival in 2005, is a virtual replication of David Mamet's 1982 play with a screenplay by him. Edmond is an upper middle class executive, and his story is a kind of morality play, with the Beelzebub and the Christian figures internalized in one cold Manhattanite Everyman. Therefore, as many reviewers complain, realistic motivation is missing. The stage directions suggest a small amount of scenery, as would be sensible given that the one-act play has 25 scenes set in a variety of places, the majority of them in Times Square's places of business: bar, street, massage parlor, peep show, cheap hotel, pawn shop, subway, mission. It's the mind of Edmond where the drama takes place. He's a type, and so are those he meets. It's the play's virtue, not its weakness.

After hearing a fortune teller declare he is not where he belongs, Edmond tells his wife he is leaving (she does not excite him "spiritually or sexually"). Impeccably dressed, he meets  an impeccably dressed shill--as the play proceeds, he loses his tie, his clothes becomes rumpled and then bloody, he dons a prison suit, is marched naked through the cell block, and finally acquires an entirely new appearance, to which I will return. This kind of stage business is typical of the medieval genre on which I think Mamet modeled his play. After  a brief conversation about how Blacks are  to be admired because they do not have the white man's responsibilities and restraints,  the shill directs Edmond to a bar ("you have to get something opens your nose").

                   

Edmond does find something that opens his nose, but it's not among the commercial sex attractions of the Deuce. B-girls, strippers, prostitutes, live peep dancers, 3-card monte games: Edmond does not like to be rooked, and bargains unsuccessfully to drive down their prices as he negotiates his way among the ethnic, sexual, racial diversity of the city's vice zone: Italian, Russian, Asian, African-American, Hispanic, Israeli. It's his middle-class businessman's way of keeping self-respect, establishing control. The result is that the monte scammers beat him up. So he gets himself a gun, and uses it to pistol-whip a pimp who tries the Murphy Game on him ("you coon, you cunt, you cocksucker.")

Now he's the man. Turning into a ur-Dr. Phil clone, he chats up a waitress with an "in the moment," break-loose-and-follow-your-impulses spiel about rejecting the restraints of  decency and civility. "There is no history; there is just now." He stood up for himself against the pimp who would rob him, got some "warlike blood in his veins." Now that he's earned respect, he can, for the first time, recognize the Black Man as a person. That is, a person he has beaten and bloodied.

But Everyman can't stop preening. Back at the pretty young waitress' apartment, he freaks her out with his  rant ("I want you to change your life with me. Right now, for whatever that may be").  She screams, calls him the devil, and curses him. He kills her with a kitchen knife, shouting "now look what you've done." There is nothing of Christian restraint or humility in Edmond.  He's asserted himself, he's broken loose. Now he's Beelzebub. He's engaged in assault and murder, the murder of a young woman whose only mistake was listening too closely to a man who must have communicated to her his light-hearted enthusiasm and his feeling of liberation from long-tolerated frustrations.

Mamet does not, of course, preach about despair and repentance. It's the 20th century, and God is silent, and inaccessible. Mamet sends his Everyman off to what may be hell. His wife visits him, which is like a funeral to him. He ruminates that "every fear hides a wish," and he thinks he is going to like it in prison. After the humiliating march naked, while other prisoners jeer, to his cell, where his cell mate tells him, "just get on my body." In the film's final scene, Edmond seems much older. He has shaved his head, has a walrus mustache, and wears a tattoo: two hearts pierced by an arrow (a gruesome reminder of his murder). He also has a black dot beneath one eye, perhaps a sign to other prisoners that he is his cell mate's sexual property. And yet, after rejecting the prison chaplain as an ineffectual hypocrite, he may have found the place where he belongs. He kisses his roommate good night after a philosophical conversation about whether it is possible to know good people from evil ones, whether there is an afterlife, and whether it's a hell or a heaven.  The conversation reflects the total moral and intellectual confusion of the two men. But there is also change and struggle, as opposed to the rootedness in limbo of the Times Square shills, pimps, prostitutes, con men and bar owners, and their customers.