Mamet's meaty 'Edge' bears weight

"The Edge" refers to a simple hunting knife. The one a trendy fashion photographer gives to a bored billionaire as a birthday gift. The one both the billionaire and the photographer will use to hunt squirrels for food 24 hours later.

Penned by David Mamet, "The Edge" is a kind of film that delights in seeing a "sophisticated man" temporarily reduced to his instinct of self-preservation. The essence of any movie has once been described as "you put a guy up a tree; you get him down." In "The Edge," the tree is quite literal, and there's a man-eating bear hanging around it.

Anthony Hopkins plays Charles, the billionaire, whose trophy wife - is there any other kind of wife in a David Mamet script? - happens to be a fashion model who might or might not be sleeping with her photographer Bob (Alec Baldwin).

Anthony Hopkins fights the bear in Lee Tarnahori's "The Edge."

Suspicious, Charles follows her to a remote location photo shoot, a ridiculous Native American-themed enterprise. Before long, a tiny airplane crashes over unknown terrain, with Charles and Bob on board and a hungry kodiak salivating on the ground.

In one of the more predictable plot turns, another man survives as well, but it's fairly clear that this one is bear fodder. (Harold Perrineau of "Smoke" plays the part as if it were clear even to him.) The real beef of the film is between the other two.

Boy, are we dealing with fragile material here. A step to one side - and the movie turns into muddy social satire: See billionaire eat squirrel! A step to the other - and we end up with "The Ghost and the Darkness." Thankfully, David Mamet gives the kodiak business a rather short shrift, preventing the whole thing from mutating into "The Old Man and the Bear" of sorts.

Instead, it is a story of redemption - and the main hook of the film, once the bear gets the spear, is which one of the two main characters will be redeemed by the ordeal. The trick of "The Edge" lies in the fact that it's a human-versus-human movie masquerading as a human-versus-nature movie, and it unfolds for its first three quarters without requiring you to pick a side; when it finally does, the effect is like a harsh wake-up slap in the face.

If at first we are somewhat lulled by the traveloque imagery, however, the blame compass points straight to the director. Lee Tamahori, who first attracted Hollywood's attention with the rather unsentimental "Once Were Warriors," has since switched into a mode of lush melodrama, as evidenced by the repulsive "Mulholland Falls."

The New Zealand-born director is a natural to helm "The Edge," with its ascetic mountain vistas, but the bombast with which he approaches every other shot becomes thoroughly distracting once the human conflict sets in.

And the conflict sets in all right - in ways only David Mamet can manage it. The screenwriter, better known as the playwright behind "Glengarry Glen Ross" and "American Buffalo," is a master of the inobtrusive set-up: He plants drama in minuscule bits, shuffling them together with mundane dialogue and routine actions - so that some crucial plot points can only be seen in retrospect, after the resolution. As "The Edge" hurtles along, it keeps changing your perception of what you've already seen.

Mamet also being the Stradivari of the shouting match, Hopkins and Baldwin get to exercise some serious acting chops as well. By now, it shouldn't surprise anyone that the eldest Baldwin can hold his own against the best of thespians; his effortless manner in "The Edge" reminds one of the early Kevin Costner (laid back but not yet to a fault). Elle Macpherson bookends the film as Charles' wife, to no discernible effect.

"The Edge" at once spoofs and upholds a tradition of wilderness movies actually teaching you something about wilderness. The film is loaded with more practical survival information than a diary of a Montana Freeman.

With the characters, you learn - and with the characters, you chuckle at having to learn - how to make a compass out of a needle, for instance, or (the central metaphysical joke of the film) fire from ice.

The main lesson, however, is the instability of the cultural buildup masking the base nature of our conflicts: a goose in an airplane propeller takes care of it in a second. And that's where the hunting knife comes in.

Alec Baldwin is Bob, the photographer.

09-30-97