Post by Dracula on Sept 26, 2021 18:53:05 GMT -5
The Card Counter(9/12/2021)
Usually when a director has “lost it” they never come back to relevancy again but Paul Schrader somehow managed to do it with his 2017 film First Reformed, which reconnected with his roots as an appreciator of the European classics and which mostly avoided descending into some of Schrader’s more lurid instincts. It won him some of his best reviews since 2002’s Auto Focus and sparked a new appreciation for his role in cinema since the late 70s and in the eyes of many put him back among the ranks of great veteran filmmakers working today. Pretty impressive. Of course the question that gets asked after a triumph like that is: “what’s next?” Would Schrader use his newfound clout to make another film that would further explore that movie’s old school aesthetic? Or would he return to some of the attempts at commerciality that often blew up in his face? Or would the seventy five year old filmmaker simply quite while he was ahead? Well, he certainly hasn’t taken that last route as he has now released his follow-up film, a drama starring Oscar Isaac called The Card Counter which is getting a decent if perhaps abrupt and poorly promoted release.
The film follows a man who travels under the alias William Tell (Oscar Isaac) and is already living a solitary life of routine as a card counter at various off brand casinos around the country. As the film goes on you start to learn that his affect is the result of some extreme PTSD and deep guilt for his actions during the War in Iraq, where he was a prison guard at Abu Gharib and was one of the foot soldiers caught up in that scandal and even served time in prison because of it. At one of his casino stops he notices there’s a national security convention going on at one of the resorts he’s frequenting and recognizes one of the speakers there, John Gordo (Willem Dafoe), as one of the architects of the torture that happened there and peaks in on one of his discussions and while their runs into a young man named Cirk (Tye Sheridan) whose late father was also one of the guards there, leading him to have a great resentment of the leaders like Gordo who got away unpunished. Seeing something of a mission in Cirk, Tell decides to take the young man under his wing and travel with him and strikes a deal with a sort of gambling agent named La Linda (Tiffany Haddish) to stake him into playing in bigger tournaments so that he can make money to help this young man but this may not be as much of a road to redemption as it seems.
At its heart this is a movie about a tortured man with a rough past he regrets trying to find some measure of redemption by helping a younger person with their own demons in a world that is harsh to them… which is a story type we’ve seen a lot of especially lately. I call it the “Shane” formula and we often see it play out in more literal and violent ways, frequently against post-apocalyptic landscapes and I’m a bit over it. This one is at least aesthetically different from a lot of those by being a simple drama set in the modern world and the ending is slightly different from the usual formula. Beyond that the movie is classic Schrader almost to the point of self-plagiarism; it’s about a self-loathing, often nocturnal man wrestling with demons who ultimately goes through a violent catharsis, seemingly only finding some semblance of peace in a coda (which, possible spoiler, involves the same Robert Bresson homage he’s used in two other films). The difference is that this character, at least outwardly, has quite a bit more self-control than some of his other protagonists like Travis Bickle or Jake LaMotta who are more openly tortured and self-destructive. This guy has a certain military precision to his travels and his movements at the card table and to most outside observers would seem like a pretty normal guy at least until they learned more about his isolated lifestyle.
Visually the film is a bit more straightforward than First Reformed and is less of a outwardly obvious homage to other films. It does become more adventurous in its flashback scenes which are shot with this super wide lens that reminded me a bit of the photography in Steven Soderbergh’s recent No Sudden Move but here it has more of a purpose as it’s trying to make his time as a guard at Abu Gharib look as nightmarish as possible. Speaking of Abu Gharib, that aspect of the story is probably its closest linkage to First Reformed as both movies are trying to apply Shraderian meditation to very post-millennial political issues. Abu Gharib is an event that feels oddly “old news” at this point which is partly the point here, the world has moved on but this character hasn’t and the scars of that recent dishonor are there whether people want them to be or not and there is something interesting about the fact that the film calls out that incident by name rather than dancing around it. By and large it’s a pretty well made movie but hardly a revelatory career highlight for Schrader like his last film was and when all is said and done will probably fit in better with some of his more “average” projects like Light Sleeper or Adam Resurrected, but it will probably be more seen than those films were and there isn’t much “wrong” with it outside of redundancy and is certainly a lot better than some of Schrader’s occasional low points.
***1/2 out of Five
Usually when a director has “lost it” they never come back to relevancy again but Paul Schrader somehow managed to do it with his 2017 film First Reformed, which reconnected with his roots as an appreciator of the European classics and which mostly avoided descending into some of Schrader’s more lurid instincts. It won him some of his best reviews since 2002’s Auto Focus and sparked a new appreciation for his role in cinema since the late 70s and in the eyes of many put him back among the ranks of great veteran filmmakers working today. Pretty impressive. Of course the question that gets asked after a triumph like that is: “what’s next?” Would Schrader use his newfound clout to make another film that would further explore that movie’s old school aesthetic? Or would he return to some of the attempts at commerciality that often blew up in his face? Or would the seventy five year old filmmaker simply quite while he was ahead? Well, he certainly hasn’t taken that last route as he has now released his follow-up film, a drama starring Oscar Isaac called The Card Counter which is getting a decent if perhaps abrupt and poorly promoted release.
The film follows a man who travels under the alias William Tell (Oscar Isaac) and is already living a solitary life of routine as a card counter at various off brand casinos around the country. As the film goes on you start to learn that his affect is the result of some extreme PTSD and deep guilt for his actions during the War in Iraq, where he was a prison guard at Abu Gharib and was one of the foot soldiers caught up in that scandal and even served time in prison because of it. At one of his casino stops he notices there’s a national security convention going on at one of the resorts he’s frequenting and recognizes one of the speakers there, John Gordo (Willem Dafoe), as one of the architects of the torture that happened there and peaks in on one of his discussions and while their runs into a young man named Cirk (Tye Sheridan) whose late father was also one of the guards there, leading him to have a great resentment of the leaders like Gordo who got away unpunished. Seeing something of a mission in Cirk, Tell decides to take the young man under his wing and travel with him and strikes a deal with a sort of gambling agent named La Linda (Tiffany Haddish) to stake him into playing in bigger tournaments so that he can make money to help this young man but this may not be as much of a road to redemption as it seems.
At its heart this is a movie about a tortured man with a rough past he regrets trying to find some measure of redemption by helping a younger person with their own demons in a world that is harsh to them… which is a story type we’ve seen a lot of especially lately. I call it the “Shane” formula and we often see it play out in more literal and violent ways, frequently against post-apocalyptic landscapes and I’m a bit over it. This one is at least aesthetically different from a lot of those by being a simple drama set in the modern world and the ending is slightly different from the usual formula. Beyond that the movie is classic Schrader almost to the point of self-plagiarism; it’s about a self-loathing, often nocturnal man wrestling with demons who ultimately goes through a violent catharsis, seemingly only finding some semblance of peace in a coda (which, possible spoiler, involves the same Robert Bresson homage he’s used in two other films). The difference is that this character, at least outwardly, has quite a bit more self-control than some of his other protagonists like Travis Bickle or Jake LaMotta who are more openly tortured and self-destructive. This guy has a certain military precision to his travels and his movements at the card table and to most outside observers would seem like a pretty normal guy at least until they learned more about his isolated lifestyle.
Visually the film is a bit more straightforward than First Reformed and is less of a outwardly obvious homage to other films. It does become more adventurous in its flashback scenes which are shot with this super wide lens that reminded me a bit of the photography in Steven Soderbergh’s recent No Sudden Move but here it has more of a purpose as it’s trying to make his time as a guard at Abu Gharib look as nightmarish as possible. Speaking of Abu Gharib, that aspect of the story is probably its closest linkage to First Reformed as both movies are trying to apply Shraderian meditation to very post-millennial political issues. Abu Gharib is an event that feels oddly “old news” at this point which is partly the point here, the world has moved on but this character hasn’t and the scars of that recent dishonor are there whether people want them to be or not and there is something interesting about the fact that the film calls out that incident by name rather than dancing around it. By and large it’s a pretty well made movie but hardly a revelatory career highlight for Schrader like his last film was and when all is said and done will probably fit in better with some of his more “average” projects like Light Sleeper or Adam Resurrected, but it will probably be more seen than those films were and there isn’t much “wrong” with it outside of redundancy and is certainly a lot better than some of Schrader’s occasional low points.
***1/2 out of Five
