Pun Salad

William H. Macy plays Edmond Burke, a seemingly successful cog in Manhattan's corporate machine. One day, a perceived slight from a superior, followed immediately by a glimpse of an illicitly-canoodling couple in an elevator, sends Edmond to a fortune teller. This, in turn, causes him to walk out on his wife and embark on a short and seedy odyssey of self-discovery, which ends very badly for him and a number of people he encounters.

The screenplay is by David Mamet, based on his one-act play. So (unsuprisingly) just about everyone's dialog is stilted and unreal. It's hard to say what the point of the movie is. Is Mamet trying to paint some broad lessons of masculinity, race relations, corporatism, violence, etc.? That's a tough point to make, since just about everything Edmond and his co-stars say on these topics is preposterous windy claptrap.

Or is the movie really about self-discovery? If so, then the implied answer is unequivocal: that might not be a very good idea, dude.

I noticed that there's only one letter difference between the title character's name and that of Edmund Burke, the great 18th century Whig statesman. Better minds than I will have to dig out the thorny question of whether there are any intentional lessons to be gleaned about Edmond's slide into self-destruction from Reflections on the Revolution in France.