Cry Freedom

Edmond 18, Key Cities Edmond Burke (William H. Macy) is middle-aged, middle-American, dully employed, dully married. One evening, on his way home from work, a quasi-mystical whim leads him to consult a fortune-teller who tells him, ‘You are not where you belong.’ The consequences of this are felt later that evening when he says to his wife, ‘I’m going.’ ‘For cigarettes?’ she queries. ‘For ever,’ he replies.

He flees. He flees first to a bar where he cries, plaintively, ‘I want to feel like a man.’ Then it’s to Palm Beach where he buys a condo, starts a vegetable garden, plays boules, does yoga, lives happily ever after. Or would have done, but this is a David Mamet script and with a David Mamet script you know that you are not going to get yoga or boules or even a sniff of a veg patch. In fact, when Edmond cries, ‘I want to feel like a man,’ you know the genie is well out of the bottle, the genie means business, and that there will be no putting it back.