Paul Schrader’s new movie “The Card Counter,” which opens today, is a buddy movie, but not definitely. It’s a highway motion picture, but not seriously. It is a gambling film, but not actually. And it’s a war motion picture, but not seriously. It is a slippery eel of a movie, evading our grasp and swimming the other way every single time we feel we have gotten ahold of the place it is going.
But of all its deserted flirtations with genre conventions, it is the remaining 1 that has the most impact. “The Card Counter” is set in the existing working day, but it is haunted by the shameful legacy of Abu Ghraib and the Iraq War, even if the conflict is only viewed through the distorted lens—a fish-eye lens, to be exact—of memory and slumber.
Oscar Isaac performs a previous military interrogator (study: torturer), now operating below the alias “William Explain to,” and who served far more than eight decades at Leavenworth jail for war crimes at Abu Ghraib. In his extensive a long time in the pen, he learned how to rely playing cards, which has develop into his de facto vocation. Devoid of a household to speak of, William traverses the country, from casino to casino, exactly where he deploys his card-counting know-how to acquire just more than enough hard cash to retain him afloat to the next working day, but not as well a great deal to warrant his expulsion from the tables.
William is less a flesh-and-blood male than a spectral power gracing a casino’s presence, playing his fingers with academic rigor, and moving onto the upcoming task. His inner torment is only obvious when his head hits the pillow, and PTSD nightmares give a heightened peek into his time at Abu Ghraib, sequences Schrader ingeniously films in the uninterrupted, position-of-watch format of a initially-particular person shooter match.
This roving, insular lifetime appears to be his destiny, till he happens on a lecture, at a meeting in a casino, by a acquainted identify: Major John Gordo (Willem Dafoe), who skilled him in “enhanced interrogation tactics,” and who now performs in the non-public sector, developing systems for legislation enforcement. It’s listed here that William fulfills a conference attendee 50 percent his age, Cirk (Tye Sheridan), who shares a history, and hatred, for John Gordo. An unlikely bond is formed, with the directionless youthful male joining William on his endless on line casino run.
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Oscar Isaac is no stranger to playing brooding loners. You can argue his entire vocation consists of variations on the concept, with “Inside Llewyn Davis” and “A Most Violent Year” springing most rapidly to intellect. But it is Paul Schrader’s preceding film, the magisterial “First Reformed,” that “The Card Counter” most of course conjures.
William is pretty a lot like Ethan Hawke’s Ernst Toller, the cancer-riddled priest who loses his faith in the prior movie. Both equally adult males are creatures of their routines, and who are disinclined toward change. Each detail their ideas in hand-prepared journals, and equally pick out to stay in muted, monastic environments nearer to prisons than residences. The most telling matter about William Tell is that he transforms every single low-priced motel in which he stays into fashioned replicas of the jail cell where he discovered to rely playing cards, removing artwork from the partitions, disconnecting the cellular phone and clock and Tv, and covering the home furnishings in institutional white sheets. His survival relies upon on deprivation.
Also as in “First Reformed,” there is a woman who capabilities as his likely savior, in this circumstance a wonderful Tiffany Haddish as La Linda, a veteran gambling insider who agrees to be William’s monetary backer if he’s ready to participate in for higher stakes. William does, for the gain of Cirk, his not likely kindred spirit. There is even a romantic relationship well worth discovering amongst William and La Linda. William may be heading towards a redeemed life—call him next reformed—if only Schrader’s instinctual fatalism would remain out of the way.
Occasional voice-overs from William put us in his normally opaque headspace, giving important insights into the motives for the way he is. At a person position, he claims that he may well be a individual “suited to a lifetime of incarceration,” a profound acknowledgment that he may be way too damaged for culture. It’s a trait that one-way links him to a further Schrader veteran: Travis Bickle, in his screenplay for “Taxi Driver.”
William Tell is neither hero nor villain but, like Travis, a victim of the modern society that developed him. Dafoe’s John Gordo is a a lot more obvious villain, but he’s much more of a middle-management functionary, when the crimes this nation’s military dedicated ended up additional systemic in nature. Video clips of Donald Rumsfeld that flash briefly all through a person of William’s voice-overs get nearer to the abject villainy “The Card Counter” exposes—the criminal decay at the very leading. As Cirk puts it so astutely, and I’m paraphrasing, “it’s not a number of rotten apples—it’s the barrel they arrived in.” As we’re just one day away from the 20th anniversary of 9-11, “The Card Counter” brutally reminds us that we must also in no way forget about what we did in response.
“The Card Counter” is now taking part in at Cinemark Palace 20 and Regal Shadowood in Boca Raton, Cinemark Boynton Beach and other region theaters.
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