Croupier

Croupier (Mike Hodges, 1998) revolves so pervasively around its eponymous central character, Jack Manfred, that it's jarring when we see him asleep in a scene near the end of the picture.  The film is rooted in the central character's perspective to the extent that when his eyes are shut, we reflexively feel that our eyes should be shut too.  Someone shakes Jack awake and we feel the gesture as a sort of violation.  There's no outside, as it were, to Jack's story -- we're embedded in his consciousness and, so, when the movie falters from his point of view, it seems as if things are going wrong.  And, indeed, in its last fifteen minutes. the film does go awry.  However, the picture is written with razor-sharp dialogue and, for most of its length, is gripping and highly effective.  Croupier is a neo-noir, complete with a heist plot, and, like Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (as well as other examples of the genre), the ultra-tough and stoic nature of the film is amplified by the croupier's voice-over narrative -- utterances that are world-weary and completely, unremittingly cynical.  Twice, the croupier quotes Hemingway:  something to the effect that the world breaks everyone but that some, once mended, are stronger in the broken places.  When these words are spoken, another character, the rotten and nihilistic Matt, replies: "He killed himself, didn't he?"  When the Hemingway aphorism is cited late in the film, the croupier completes the quotation to the effect that "life breaks everyone" and, even, the courageous are ruined in the end.  This is the world of film noir, best characterized by the words:  "We're all fucked."  

Croupier is only as persuasive as the performance given by Clive Owen as Jack Manfred, the titular character.  Owen is very good, embodying an odd combination of laconic stoicism and, rather, febrile obsession:  he sees himself as the pivot of the vast roulette wheel that is the world.  He is the unmoved mover who delights in seeing the ruin of everyone revolving around him.  Jack doesn't gamble and, in fact, despises as "losers" ("good customers" in casino parlance) the people who frequent the games over which he presides.  He is a control freak, intensely focused on preserving himself from pollution by the "cess-pit" (as one character describes the casino) in which he is surrounded.  Jack wants to be a writer and is struggling to compose a novel, a book that gradually becomes an account or narration of the movie that we are seeing.  He's wildly successful -- at the end of the movie, the novel is a bestseller although Jack steadfastly evades fame; he doesn't want to be associated with the the book, a depiction of sordid events in the casino where he is employed, and has published the book anonymously.  His boss at the Casino is shown reading the book although vanity, I think, prevents him from seeing that the novel portrays the business that he manages -- "after all," the voice-over tells us, "casinos are all alike."  In the old physiology of the humors, there was a personality type described as the "saturnine".  Clive Owens embodies the saturnine; he casts a cold, indifferent gimlet eye on the people around him.  Although he doesn't lift a finger, more or less, to impress the females with whom he associates, his personal charisma is such that he has three beautiful  women who dote upon him -- but he seems to have sex with them rather reluctantly; sex signifies some lack of control and some surrender of personal autonomy, things that he abhors.  It's not an accident that, when the film ends, his girlfriend is a former S&M dominatrix:  her dispassionate and icy disposition mirrors his own.  During the course of the film, Jack is central in just about every shot -- the camera goes where he goes.  His chilly sensibility controls the film.  Clive Owen is perfectly cast, moving in some scenes with incredible grace and skill (he's a master card-shark) and, at other times, stalking about like a zombie.  Jack wears a black bowler hat and, for his work at the casino, has dyed his hair black as well -- the film takes place around Christmas with  the climactic heist on Christmas Eve and so it's cold and Jack wears a long coat.  There is something rabbinical about his appearance; he looks like some kind of emaciated Talmudic scholar as he goes about the streets of London.

Croupier's plot is complex and involves various, puzzling dead-ends.  The movie's narrative seems derived from something much longer and more intricate -- the film is only 92 minutes long and, simply put, there is too much plot loaded onto the rather slender framework of the movie.  An example is the hero's romantic entanglements -- there are three women with whom he is involved and this seems somewhat excessive, particularly since the hero appears (except in one scene) to be indifferent to sex, as well as so emotionally reticent as to be essentially uncommunicative.  The overlapping love affairs, involving women who seem unrealistically willing to tolerate their rivals, comprise an important part of the film, but it isn't always clear what is going on.  This is because the narrative doesn't really have the leisure to develop these aspects of the story.  Another example is a strange scene in which Jack looks at the corpse of one of his girlfriends; he's shown the body by a police detective who, then, blurts out that he was in love with the dead woman.  This police detective plays no other part in the movie and this revelation seems like a fragment from a much larger, more novelistic picture that possesses far more content than the picture that we are seeing. (The film was written by Paul Mayersberg and its original to the movie -- but it feels like many scenes have been eliminated.)  In summary, Jack is about thirty, an aspiring novelist told to ghost-write a celebrity book about soccer --  in this film, the publishing industry is regarded as corrupt to a degree equal to the casino business.  Jack has no money; he sells a car given to him by his casually amoral, wheeler-dealer father who is working at a casino in Sun City, that is, in the Republic of South Africa (where Jack was born, "in a casino" as he says).  Jack's father encourages him to apply for a job at a London casino.  Jack is fantastically skilled with cards and chips and, of course, easily gets the job. (The scenes of Jack's indoctrination at the casino are the best in the movie because they reveal fascinating details about the gambling business.)  Jack's girlfriend is a former police detective who has left the force (why? under a shadow?) and now works as a store-walker busting people for shoplifting.  Jack says that she is his "conscience".  She disapproves of Jack's new work as a casino croupier and says that she preferred him with blonde hair and as an aspiring novelist.  At the casino, Jack encounters Matt, who is a crooked employee, and Bella, the former dominatrix -- both of whom are also croupiers.  A beautiful woman gambles at the roulette wheel and clearly knows how casinos operate -- "Bright woman:  she knows the rule of gold," the voiceover informs us.  This woman, Yani, is from South Africa herself and, as it turns out, wants to enlist Jack in a scheme to steal money from the casino -- this is the heist plot; the film is so full of material that the heist is not really developed; things happen but we can't tell how the heist is engineered or implemented, although it involves poor Jack taking a beating.  Jack is opposed to stealing from the casino but, in the end, Yani tells him that she is the victim of extortion and will be severely beaten or, even, killed by her "creditors" if she can't recruit Jack, as the "inside man" for the heist.  Jack is fundamentally noble and so he decides to rescue Yani from her plight by joining in her criminal scheme. (Yani is a version of a character-type fundamental to film noir, the lethal, scheming femme fatale.)  She parades around totally nude in front of him, contrives a way to sleep with him, and, then, pays him 10,000 pounds for his role in the plot.  Jack says that he never gambles but, in fact, the heist is a huge risk and we hear the hero, in the voice-over, calculating odds on the various aspects of the conspiracy -- he has violated his rule about gambling:  obviously the heist is a dangerous wager.  At this point, the plot goes off the rails.  Jack's girlfriend, the former police detective, is mysteriously killed -- we see her corpse but it's not explained how she died or if this is some kind of retaliation for Jack's role in the crime.  The heist is staged in a way that doesn't communicate to us what is going on.  After the heist, Jack goes to a Greek restaurant where casino-people gather to party -- it's like a perpetual orgy in this restaurant.  Jack encounters a beautiful black woman who says she is a "white witch" -- a very strange utterance.  She drives him home and almost runs over a woman who is jaywalking, perhaps, an echo of what happened to Jack's store-detective girlfriend.  The "white witch" accuses Jack of not trusting woman drivers.  I have absolutely no idea what this scene means or why it is included in the movie and the character of the witch disappears as quickly as she appears in the film.  The ending is rather perfunctory with a twist that reveals that Jack's general paranoia about things is well warranted.  Jack has made a fortune on his bestselling book, marketed "through a lawyer", and returns to the casino where he delights in watching people lose their money.  His girlfriend is now Bella, the ex-dominatrix.  Three-quarters of the movie is clinically clear and lucid.  The last 15 minutes is botched and very hard to interpret -- it's as if rafts of  important information have been concealed from us.

Croupier is very entertaining and contains some superb dialogue and it is well-acted throughout.  The casino milieu is fascinating and very plausibly developed.  The movie appears to be an international production and closing credits reveal the film was shot mostly in Germany (studio work) with street footage made in London and, finally, a few phone calls to South Africa also filmed in that country.  This seems weirdly gratuitous -- all of the film could have been made in any urban center; there's no scene-setting that requires shooting in either London or at Sun City, South Africa.  It's my speculation that the producers earned tax credits and subsidies from shooting in the various places where the movie was made and that this explains the globe-trotting aspects of the movie's making.