In director Stuart Gordon's adaptation of David Mamet's 1982 play, a middle-aged, middle-class white businessman living a life of quiet desperation decides it's time for a change and ends up losing his moorings in the neon-smeared urban underworld. Edmond Burke (William H. Macy) is on his way home in an unnamed city that's clearly New York when something compels him to visit a storefront tarot reader, who intones ominously, "You are not where you belong." Restless, bored and seething with virulent discontent, meek every-schmuck Edmond walks out on his wife (Rebecca Pidgeon) and goes looking for his place in the world. Like water finding its own level, his trajectory is downhill all the way. Edmond's odyssey begins in a bar and ends in a hell of his own making, taking him along the way down a path paved with pimps, whores, B-girls, strippers, grifters, sundry predators and his own worst impulses. As he considers his options in a dimly lit bar, a casually racist stranger (Joe Mantegna) philosophizes profanely that what matters in life is "p*ssy, power, money, adventure" and, prophetically, self-destruction; he sends Edmond to the nearby Allegro club, where his ignorance of sex-for-money protocols becomes glaringly apparent. "It's too much," he protests when a bar girl (Denise Richards) hustles him for a $50 drink, and he is quickly escorted to the street. His next stop, a peep joint, goes no better, nor does his visit to the Atlantic Leisure Club or the stand-off with a three-card monte dealer that accelerates Edmond's devolution from simmering frustration to blistering violence. Written in the aftermath of a bitter divorce, Mamet's paranoid rant — an explosion of middle-aged, white-collar, white-men's rage at losing ground to everyone, from women, hustlers, African Americans and homosexuals to the younger generation nipping at their heels — is as bilious as ever, but time has overtaken and defanged it. Though at first glance this film appears to be a radical departure for Gordon, who's famous for such audacious horror films as RE-ANIMATOR (1985), it's actually a return to his roots: Gordon founded Chicago's Organic Theater Company, where he directed the original production of Mamet's Sexual Perversity in Chicago. --Maitland McDonagh
