The Edge: Another Testicular Pelicula

(That's my new term for 'guy flick'; I was looking for something that rhymed!)



Yes, another testicular pelicula. You'll think I'm a tomboy. Well, I am, but only sort of.



Another of my movies for life--and I don't know about Gess, but I'm grabbing these out of the mind-box in no order, chronological or otherwise--is a little-remembered film called The Edge, by David Mamet, directed by Lee Tamahori. It stars Anthony Hopkins and an extra-specially-annoying Alec Baldwin as the male two thirds of a (heterosexual) love triangle, cast alone together upon a hostile Alaskan wilderness. They spend most of the movie fighting for their lives, and of course they bond in the process--but only sort of.



The absolutely only thing that sold me on this movie before I'd seen it, was Hopkins. That, and the price: two dollars. I picked The Edge out of the sale bin at the movie store in a strip mall next to Sun Harvest grocery in El Paso, Texas, in 2001. As I recall, I had ducked in there to avoid somebody I didn't feel like running into, and so I deliberated quite awhile over those videocassettes! (I also bought Dead Man Walking, but found it pointless. It didn't survive the move, when I moved.)



I picked The Edge because I was collecting movies with Anthony Hopkins in them. Hopkins gives me a warm, family feeling. He has an air of my Grandfather Lyman about him, and I am, in fact, Welsh, on that side of my family, which means almost nothing at all, aside from the physical characteristics. He seems to play good guys, too. He plays one in this movie: he's the hero. (Never mind about Hannibal Lector; those days are gone.)
Baldwin plays--there is no other way to put it--a jerk, and I found him quite believable in the role. I thought Alec Baldwin was a jerk even before he came to our attention shrieking at his daughter when he thought nobody was taping his phone conversation. The character Baldwin plays in this movie would probably do something like that, if he had a daughter.



The Edge was more or less overlooked, by reviewers, I hear. Back when I was beginning to fall in love with it, I found a bunch of online reviews, and they all dwelt on its status as an adventure tale and not at all on its message of survival of the virtuous: Hopkins plays a survivor, humble, successful, unappreciated, underestimated, and, in the end, triumphant. Reviewers entirely missed character development, likely because these characters are purposely underdeveloped--as are the characters in No Country for Old Men, come to think of it!



It's not a guy flick; it's a one-guy flick: the movie is entirely carried by Anthony Hopkins--and a most excellent trained grizzly bear, named Bart. Reviewers said more about Bart, than I am going to. It's my movie-for-life, after all!



I’ll write five posts about this film, in addition to this introductory one:



1. Our Story
2. The Bookworm
3. Younger Man, Envying
4. The Faithless Trophy Wife, a non-Character
5. The Accidental Victor




Onward!