Edmond, David Mamet's 1982 play, had a highly-acclaimed London revival in 2002 with Kenneth Branagh in the title role. I suppose that the critical accolades and moderate financial success of that production gave Mamet and his investors the impression that his play could still be relevant as a film.

Wrong.

The styles of acting and playwriting change dramatically over time. Watch a John Barrymore film some time and you'll see what I mean. The man was so hammy that his performances would embarrass Bill Shatner, but in his time many people considered him a great actor, and he was never lacking for employment until his drinking undid him. That type of stentorian acting was in fashion once, in a world before Brando and DeNiro. Read the great American stage plays of the 20s and 30s, and you'll have a reaction something like, "People used to like this kind of stuff?" Yes, astoundingly, people used to think that it was an uplifting experience to sit in a theater and listen to professional orators (for that's what actors really were then) deliver sculpted and polished dialogue which bore no resemblance to everyday human speech. That sort of thing may even come back into fashion one day.

But this is not that day.

At least not in cinema. The hyper-literate and rhetorical style of writing and performing still exists in the world of legitimate theater, but it has totally died out from film. The intimacy of the movie camera practically places a giant "false" tag on actors when they get caught delivering lines inappropriate for their character in a manner too broad and/or rhetorical for the situation. That's what happens to Edmond as a movie. Perhaps the great Branagh can get away with declaiming these speeches on the London stage, because he's one of those actors who can make anything seem natural and conversational, but that task was far beyond the capabilities of the performers in the filmed version of Edmond. As you watch it, you will never lose the sense that you are sitting in an audience watching a play. There is never a single moment when I found myself losing my self-awareness and getting wrapped up in the characters or the story. It was like watching one of those stagy episodes of Playhouse 90 from the 1950s, or watching a play by Inge or Tennessee Williams. One character delivers some flowery or philosophical lines while the other character or characters in the scene wait patiently for their turn to speak. We are always aware that they are actors waiting for their turn to deliver lines, and get no sense that they are real people reacting in the moment.

Does the film medium demand that the audience lose its sense of otherness from the production? I suppose opinions vary, but my opinion is "Yes, it absolutely does," because we have developed an internal clock that tells us when we have invested too much of our time and energy in a work of art or entertainment. That clock can be ignored when we are held rapt by a mystery or a spectacle or a comedy, but when a show leaves us apart from it, with the awareness that we are watching a performance, then that clock's ticking seems as loud as fireworks in our heads. We switch from being an audience at a movie to an audience a poetry-reading. This uses a very different part of our brain. Virtually every human being can sit through his favorite movie without being aware of the passage of time or even his own existence, but only one in a thousand, perhaps one in ten thousand, can make it willingly through the same period of time devoted to a speech about philosophy or a 76 minute poetry-reading, even if it is the best one he has ever imagined.

And so Edmond, a mere stripling of a one-act play running a tidy 76 minutes long, seems longer than Lawrence of Afuckingrabia. It stands as a reminder of how artificial and stilted the theater used to be, and it is only for the one in ten thousand.