Rank: #4 |
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THE CARD COUNTER 2021, R, 112 mins. Oscar Isaac as William Tell / Tye Sheridan as Cirk / Willem Dafoe as Col. John Gordo / Tiffany Haddish as La Linda / Billy Slaughter as Fiddle / Amye Gousset as Judy Baufort / Joel Michaely as Ronnie / Ekaterina Baker as Sara Written and directed by Paul Schrader |
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Writer/director
Paul Schrader has spent a majority of his career focusing on the darker
underbelly of his characters that -
in some form or another - try to find personal salvation that seems
hopelessly out of reach for them. He
seems attracted to these doomed people, and all you have to do is look at
his earlier career penning some of Martin Scorsese's greatest films like TAXI
DRIVER and RAGING BULL to see
proof positive of that. Even
his most recent - and one of this most criminally overlooked - dramas in
2017's FIRST REFORMED dealt with a
man of the cloth facing an intense spiritual crisis of conscience;
Schrader just seems to be confidently within his wheelhouse when thrusting
viewers into the headspaces of his deeply damaged personas. His latest in THE
CARD COUNTER - one of the best films of 2021 - is a further amplification
of Schrader's creative drives, and much like TAXI DRIVER (which it's most
obviously similar to, more on that in a bit) and FIRST REFORMED this is a
drama that initially tips itself off as one kind of film about a specific
subject matter and then radically shifts gears and becomes about something
else altogether. THE CARD
COUNTER is about, yes, a card counting gambler, but it's really the
furthest thing from being exclusively about casino life, the art of poker,
and the gambler's psyche in the manner that it ends up being a commentary
of America's post-9/11 political indiscretions and how the gambler in
question was deeply scarred because of it.
It's akin to how TAXI DRIVER isn't wholly about angst ridden New
York cabbies or how FIRST REFORMED isn't just focused on priests and
organized religion. None of Schrader's fit neatly into easily defined
descriptions, with THE CARD COUNTER being no different.
It's really about one man's journey towards some kind of personal
redemption, with the journey in question being quite treacherous. That, and THE
CARD COUNTER is a re-affirmation of how incredible star Oscar Isaac can be
in just the right film with just the right material (his latest appearance
in the STAR WARS sequel
trilogy has unfortunately clouded over his sensational and
undervalued work in films like A MOST
VIOLENT YEAR, EX MACHINA and INSIDE
LLEWYN DAVIS.
In easily one of his best roles of his career, Isaac plays William
Tell here, a remarkably adept gambler that self-taught himself to count
cards and every other trick in the gambler playbook while doing an eight
year stint in military prison (for reasons not fully explained until later
in the story). On the
outside, William drifts around from one low key and small scale casino
after another looking to score modest victories. It's not because he lacks talent or is incapable of taking
down big game in other large markets.
He just wants to keep a low profile and win small as to not attract
too much unwanted attention to himself.
He lives out of his suitcase and wears roughly the same unassuming,
but clean cut outfit daily and stays in the cheapest of the cheap motels
that he comes across. When he
frequents a town's poker and blackjack casinos they are anything but
glamorous. To take a page out of the poker vernacular, he's basically
slow playing the meager competition...and then goes on to the next venue. But, just like in
true Schrader-ian fashion, not all seems right with William.
Some details are introduced and compellingly without any initial
explanation, like his obsessive penchant for covering literally every
piece of furniture in every motel he stays in with his packed linens that
are all meticulously held together by twine.
As the story progresses we are dropped pieces of his backstory
puzzle to put together that speaks largely towards his bet small, win
small philosophy of not sticking out too prominently to strangers.
Much of this is brought to light when he meets up with and becomes
partners with La Linda (Tiffany Haddish) and Cirk (Tye Sheridan), with the
former being a financial backer of gamblers that wants to help William win
bigger. And as for Cirk (Kirk, but with a C), he has a military background
much like William, with both of them serving under Maj. John Gordo (a
sneering Willem Dafoe), who spent his career training men like Cirk and
William in the art of illegal war prisoner torture.
Gordo never got into any legal trouble over his past sins, whereas
William did, and now that he's with Cirk all his younger protégée wants
to do is kidnap their former boss and enact some vengeance on him.
Predictably, this isn't easy and is beset by multiple roadblocks. It's here when
THE CARD COUNTER's commonalities with Schrader's own TAXI DRIVER become
that much more apparent. Both
William Tell and Travis Bickle are former military veterans that have been
left psychologically charred by their war time.
Both William and Travis are seeking for some sort of cathartic
spiritual redemption by befriending younger people in hopes of
"saving them" (with Travis wanting to save a teen prostitute and
William focusing on his younger fellow war vet).
And more obviously, both William and Travis put down their daily
thoughts on paper, and their respective dairy ruminations become a
voiceover narration track for their stories. I don't think that Schrader is lazily pilfering from his own
playbook here, but rather allowing William's tale of isolation and hellish
memories of a dreaded past to mirror that of Travis, which leads to both
films complimenting and book ending one another.
If there's one concrete difference between these characters and
their arcs then it would be that with THE CARD COUNTER we get nightmarishly
trippy flashbacks to William's stint as a prisoner torturer in Abu Ghraib,
which informs quite a bit of his tale.
Schrader also does some truly mesmerizing and technically audacious
things with these flashbacks, utilizing multiple fish eye lenses,
hallucinogenic camera panning and editing, and an overall visual motif of
chilling chaos that makes these military torture scenes feel like bad
dreams come to life. Equally brilliant
is how Schrader completely absconds away from our preconceived notions of
what to expect from this material. Indeed,
we do get many scenes of poker and blackjack that showcases William's unparalleled
skills at reading the table making mince meat of his opponents.
We get obligatory scenes of William dispensing gambling wisdom to
the greenhorn Cirk. We also
get a build up to the "big final match" that has William
participating in a winner take all tournament.
But THE CARD COUNTER couldn't be any less interested in the
standard accoutrements of these type of genre pictures.
As the film unfolds it becomes clear that Schrader is more invested
in the intimate mysteries that typify his characters and what truly makes
them unhealthily tick. Whether
or not William "wins" in the end is redundant.
If anything, gambling is something that William is a part of, but
it's not what totally defines him. It's
simply a conduit towards what he considers an end game of redemption.
And, as mentioned, like all great Schrader characters, William
wages a war within himself over his past and present, and it all comes to
a head in thoroughly ugly ways, especially in the manner it exposes a
nasty side of American foreign policy and how the country went unchecked
and too far during their war on terror, with lingering traumatizing side
effects. Oscar Isaac is so
pitch perfectly modulated and dialed in here as William, and his
performance is its own kind of gambling act in terms of never telegraphing
nor showing the lurid depths of this man's past horrors and keeping that
all bottled up inside. There's
an unnerving calmness to William throughout, and part of the suspense of
the picture is in waiting for all of his internalized rage to come out for
all to see. I also greatly
admired the against type and unconventional casting of Tiffany Haddish,
who is much more well know for ultra broad comedic roles, but here she
acclimates herself remarkably well playing opposite of Isaac, and they
pair develop some authentic, slow simmering chemistry that pays off well
in the latter sections. If
there was a weak point in THE CARD COUNTER then it would be with Sheridan,
a solid actor in his own right that's a bit stiff and wooden in his scenes
with Isaac early on, but as his character's journey intensifies you can
see Sheridan maturing into the role. Once THE CARD COUNTER ensnared me within its unorthodox and unpredictable handling of the material and all of the possibilities contained within I was (no pun intended) all in. If you're expecting a casino drama that sticks to preordained narrative arcs and genre troupes then you'll surely be disappointed with the end result here. THE CARD COUNTER isn't compelled by the thrills of poker conquest and achieving gambling supremacy. It's a film about cementing us within the torment of its main lost soul who may never be capable of salvation. That's the quintessential Schrader archetype. And even at 75 years old, the filmmaker doesn't show any signs of running out of gas at all. With masterful turns as of late like FIRST REFORMED and now this it's apparent that maybe he's just getting warmed up at the table. |
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