The Card Counter
Starring Oscar Isaac, Tiffany Haddish, Tye Sheridan, and Willem Dafoe
Written & Directed by Paul Schrader
Rating: **
Whenever I think of Paul Schrader I am reminded of his emphatically erotic cinema like Cat People and his classic collaborations with Martin Scorsese. As a director Schrader never impressed me except for his last film First Reformer which was a powerful exploration of faith.
One could see the Card Counter, which has been widely appreciated, as a counterpoint to First Reformed. While that film was about faith this one is about losing it. It’s set in the cynical suspicious dog-eat-dog world of high-stake gambling.The hero, if we may call him that, is William Tell, played by the karmic chameleon Oscar Isaac who doesn’t look similar in any two roles. Here, with his hair slickened back and expensive suits he is every inch the high-stakes gambler.
Schrader enters the world of card addicts with a surety of purpose. Yes, he has done his research properly. But his characters are weak shallow people . More poseurs than practitioners, more doers than thinkers, these characters are neither dumb nor deep. They are just boring.
Midway, or maybe earlier, the director realizes how dry the goings-on may seem to spectators. So this becomes a story of a lost nowhere man(William lives only in hotel rooms and convers all furniture with white cloth to expose his anonymity) and his surrogate son, played by the very talented young Tye Sheridan who was so good as the autistic Night Manager.
Sheridan possesses the ability to highlight the tragedy of his character’s inability to intellectualize his predicament. He plays a boy-man who knows he is in trouble but cannot make full sense of why and how. We are told his father was tortured in prison.And now he wants to kill the man responsible for his father’s death, with William’s help.
The unnecessary complications of a plot that never takes off are further accentuated by the zero rapport between the father figure and his surrogate-son. Did Oscar Isaac and Ty Sheridan even meet before shooting? They look as indifferent to one another’s presence as we to this film.
The Card Counter tries to be a layered look at gambling as a metaphor of life’s uncertainties. It ends up as a big mess where even the sprightly Tiffany Haddish, such a sunshine presence n Billy Crystal’s Here Today,cannot dispel the gloom of creative disintegration.This is a film that is as doomed as it characters. It chooses to drown in its own doom.
