The Edge

SPOILER ALERT.

Anthony Hopkins is scary good in this movie.  He’s always very good, but for some reason he’s scary good in this.

One of the important things he does is make Mamet’s trademark rhythms feel utterly natural and in character.

Alec Baldwin, already with a little Mamet under his belt at this point, is also good, but takes a little while to come into focus for some reason, for me anyway.  Maybe because he has to make the transition from Take Charge Fashion Photographer to Scared Airplane Crash Survivor to Flailing Helpless Guy to Cold-Blooded Killer All Along to Sobbing Helpless Guy to Dying Guy, and needs to find a common thread through all that.

This is one of my favorite Mamet scripts, even though it’s a movie about a couple of guys and a bear.

Lee Tamahori’s direction is elegant and unfussy.  The dramatic scenes are understated and natural, the action scenes are nerve-wracking and upsetting.

The bear performs admirably and the stunt work is terrific.  Either that or those are real movie stars fighting with a bear and falling down mountains and treading carefully across a log over a high waterfall.

Harold Perrineau holds up well under the burden of playing the role of “non-star who gets eaten by a bear.”

The roles in general are written with great humanity and nuance. 

I dig nuance.  Movies are full of cliches, this one included, they are in fact smoothly efficient vehicles for cliches, and in fact they thrive on cliche and depend for their survival on cliche.  So nuance and detail become important in selling these stories.

An unusual 4-act structure for a 2-hour film.  Act 1 is, “Let’s have an adventure, even though there are definite tensions between the principles.”  Act 2 is “Well, maybe having an adventure wasn’t such a good idea.”  Act 3 is “Oh holy fucking shit, there’s fucking BEAR WHO WANTS TO EAT US.”  Act 4 is “How about that, we killed the bear.  Oh shit, these tensions between us just got worse.”  And you could even split Act 4 into two distinct sections, each about 15 pages long, one being “Aha!  Forgot all about this, did you?” and “Well, that was a bad idea too.  Shall we go home now?”

And then, 97 minutes into the movie, comes the Wind.

Back in 1996 or so, there was a Star Wars video game called Dark Forces.  There was a level to the game that took place on the ice planet of Hoth.  Hoth was cold and windy, as ice planets tend to be, and there was a recording of Wind that played, over and over, throughout the entire level.  Since I’m a really crappy player, I spent many, many days trying to get the fuck off of the ice planet of Hoth, and got to know that Wind very, very well.

Now I can barely watch a movie with an outdoor scene, because they keep using that same Wind.  Most recently it was featured in the opening minutes of Sydney Pollack’s The Interpreter to emphasize the desolate quality of a hot, dusty African road.  Of course, for me it will always evoke the freezing cold and sheer ice cliffs of Hoth, so that scene just didn’t work for me.  In The Edge, at least, it’s set among the majestic peaks of what I’m guessing is the Canadian Rockies, so at least the “cold” part of it works.  But as soon as the Wind came on, I started looking for stormtroopers and Imperial droids.

There is a very funny account of the filming of The Edge in producer Art Linson’s book What Just Happened?