SOURCE: Kauffmann, Stanley. “Wait a While.” New Republic 217, no. 17 (27 October 1997): 26-7.

In the following excerpt, Kauffmann comments on the predictability of The Edge.

This, as it turns out, is National Forbearance Week—anyway, I hope so. Three important artists have produced wavering work, and without blinking the present facts, it's the moment for those of us who value those artists to remember what they have done and to await what may come from them.

David Mamet, a premier American dramatist, is essentially an urban writer. Most of his best plays—The Water Engine, American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross, for instance—have looked at city grittiness the way a microphotograph looks at the eye of a fly, finding mystery in enlarged detail. A film he wrote and directed, House of Games, drew us into the mazes of urban chicanery. Most of the screenplays he has adapted from other people's...