The Edge: Faithless Trophy Wife, a non-Character

And now, the wife. How am I going to write 500 words about a non-character?

Last time, I commented that The Edge seems at first like a Jack London story: man-against-nature--and I do not mean "people" against nature--with no character development. But either David Mamet intended it to be unexpectedly deep, or else Anthony Hopkins happened upon the cuckold husband role and transformed the movie.

I tend to think the latter. I read that rumor in a biography of Hopkins, in fact. I learned that the Morse character, as originally written, was something of a jerk, himself: he was Cameraman Bob's own age, more or less, and, like Bob, American, and he was something of a prig. A needler. Rich, smug, and arrogant.

Gives the trophy wife's "Bet you can't stump 'im!" comment a whole new ring, doesn't it? (See The Edge: Bookworm) And it changes everything about the way the two men face off, when they do--but that's to come. Here, I must mull over the character of Mickie, Elle MacPherson's character. The trophy. There is resoundingly nothing to mull over!

Let's recap the tale: A photographer named Bob sets off on a wilderness photo shoot with his girlfriend (the model), his crew, and her husband, Charles Morse, who's footed the bill for the trip and provided the transportation. Things go wrong. The male two-thirds of the triangle are cast in sharp relief upon a mountainscape, and they have to find their way back to civilization, stalked (chillingly) by a man-eating bear. Along the way, animosity outs: the younger man's envy--and his affair--come to light and are resolved.

Meanwhile, the woman that my dad identified right away as the faithless trophy wife (MacPherson) is back at the lodge, awaiting the men's rescue and presumably twiddling her thumbs. She is about as cardboard as they come. Even she has some dignity, however; she's faithless, but she's not conniving. She seems to have some genuine affection for the old billionaire she married, considering that she's stabbing him in the back; big words like ‘loyalty’ and ‘ethics’ appear not to have occurred to her.

                                                                                                                         

What more to say?

Well...we could move to the feminist perspective.

<full stop>

I picked this movie out of the discount bin, did I not mention that? It's not popular! It's...well, it would be dismissable, but for Hopkins. Hopkins steps in, adds 20 years to the husband's age and gives him a barely-perceptible-but-no-less-distinct accent--and he drags the whole cast up to his level! More and more, I wonder what the original book or screenplay must have been like!

Gess and I agreed not to write movie reviews, but you need this information to see why I’d bother to take The Edge apart, again and again.

Or maybe I was just trying to understand a certain type of male mystique.

This movie flip-flops from male ... rutting ... to male bonding (and back, but let's save the spoiler for the subsequent posts). There's really nothing else there! If I start wagging my finger about the depth that Elle MacPherson's character lacks, I'll never get done--but, maddeningly, if she were any other way, this would be another movie! This one gives its characters simplistic treatments, because...because their author sees the world that way: Woman as anything more than foil, in a movie that examines … dueling … requires other than The Edge, for vehicle.

The End!