'You know what madness is?' crows the titular American psycho anti-hero of Edmond. 'It's self indulgence!' Sadly, the same could be said of this flippantly misanthropic nocturnal fable, adapted by David Mamet from his early Eighties stage play. After walking out on his wife because 'we're incompatible - I don't find her attractive and she hates my guts', salaried schlub Edmond heads off in search of clearly negotiated sexual thrills, only to endure a long (or, at only 82 minutes, short) dark night of the soul in which lust turns to anger with violent results. When I saw Edmond on stage in London a few years ago, the shallowness of the script was mitigated by the power of Kenneth Branagh's raw, naked performance. William H Macy is no less an actor but on screen the essential triviality of Edmond is harder to avoid. Director Stuart Gordon made his name with the outre cult shocker Re-Animator, and in his hands Mamet's material leans oddly towards cheesy horror; an early visit to a fortune teller (Twin Peaks freaky favourite Frances Bay) sees deadly tarot cards dealt to groaning, creaking musical accompaniment, flagging up the forthcoming blood-letting in big red letters.
What follows is a peculiar tug-of-war between Gordon's enthusiastically garish direction and Mamet's self-consciously stagey dialogue (his characters make Quentin Tarantino's screen ciphers seem positively naturalistic), with the former proving by far the more winning element. 'Pussy; power; money; adventure: I think that's about it,' intones Joe Mantegna's barstool philosopher, before ominously adding 'self-destruction' to the list of things a man does to 'get out of himself'. Duly encouraged, Edmond rails against 'faggots' and 'niggers', only to wind up taking it like a man in a sardonically 'redemptive' coda which proves that 'every fear hides a wish'. It's all presumably meant to be deeply ironic and darkly comic but the tone sorely lacks the desperate laughter of Scorsese's After Hours, veering all too often toward the pomposity of Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, for which grisly crime it cannot be forgiven.
