Edmond

It never hurts a movie to have both William H. Macy and Joe Mantegna, not least because there’s a good chance it’s a David Mamet film. Mantegna appears briefly in Edmond, adapted by Mamet from his one-act play and directed by Stuart Gordon, but his intervention is key.

Edmond Burke (Macy) encounters Mantegna’s character in a bar, and after the two bond over their shared racism, the latter gives the former a card with the address of a nightclub, but which Edmond momentarily sees as a Tarot card: the Hierophant.

This is ironic because the Hierophant is believed to bring religious worshipers into the presence of what is sacred, and in The Rider-Waite Tarot Deck it represents conformity to social norms or a deference to the established moral and social order, being a guide to knowledge, perception and wisdom.

Thus, in the Apollonian guise of the Hierophant, Mantegna is actually a Dionysian agent, gently nudging Edmond toward the profane and immoral, and into an downward spiral of hatred, ignorance, and crime.

The protagonist’s name is equally ironic. Edmond is related to Edmundi, which itself is derived from the Old English ēad, meaning “prosperity” or “riches”, and mund, meaning “protector.”

During the course of this fateful night, however, we see Edmond haggling fruitlessly with prostitutes, and generally illustrating the proverb 'a fool and his money are soon parted.' Additionally, more than a protector, Edmond becomes someone to be protected from.

Edmond is an utterly vile and despicable being, concerned exclusively with sex and money — specifically how much of the latter he's willing to part with in exchange for the former (Macy's performance is notable for making Edmond a human scum without entirely repelling us; his company is abhorrent and at the same time fascinating).

His victims are not shown in a much more positive light, though; they are no better than Edmond, only slightly less bad. For instance, the African-American man that Edmond be...