Paul Schrader makes serious movies about important subjects inflected with theological overtones. In the seventies, when he helped to write Raging Bull and Taxi Driver for Martin Scorsese, his scripts had the character of raw Old Testament Jeremiads. A couple of his movies, American Gigolo (1980) and Hardcore (1979) tapped into the hedonistic Zeitgeist in the late Seventies as monuments to a sober counter-cultural ethos that, nonetheless, managed to titillate by Schrader's thoroughgoing immersion in the wickedness that these films denounce. Influenced by Bresson, Schrader's films featured long-takes and austere, no frills mise-en-scene, a style that is the polar opposite to the gaudy and lurid subject matter motivating his pictures. (Although he has often worked with Martin Scorsese, he eschews that filmmaker's devoutly Catholic razz-ma-tazz, that is, Scorsese's baroque style; his use of actors and the camera, in many ways, is the opposite of Scorsese's method of film-making). Schrader's movies have never really been popular and each picture is a labor of love, carefully crafted and financed by rag-tag production groups almost akin to crowd-funding -- his film with Lindsay Lohan The Canyons was crowd-funded. He makes worthy pictures, but it's a shame that they aren't very good.
Schrader's most recent picture, The Card Counter is a lugubrious exercise that approaches self-parody. A mournful ex-con has taught himself to count cards while serving 8 1/2 years in Leavenworth. The ex-con, who calls himself "William Tell" -- he actual name is something like Bill Tillich -- is one of Schrader's typical monomaniacal loners, a cousin to Travis Bickel in Taxi Driver or the doomed pastor in First Reformed. (And the name "Tillich" refers, I presume, to the well-known Lutheran theologian.) Tell, to use the character's nom de guerre, is constricted, indeed, half-strangled by guilt that he seeks to expiate throughout the movie. An underground man after Dostoevsky's model, Tell uses his preternatural skills as a card-shark to score only modest earnings -- he prides himself as flying under the radar. (It's testament to his self-abnegation that he avoids the gaudy fleshpots of Las Vegas and prowls the melancholy casino wastelands of Atlantic City and the Midwest, riverboat and Indian casinos, and the hillbilly gambling venues at Tunica, Mississippi. (Shot on a bargain-basement budget, the movie seems to have been made mostly in Mississippi.) Tell has no friends, only remote associates, and he engages in a bizarre ritual -- every night, he wraps all the furniture at the low-rent motels that he frequents in white sheets, carefully removing all mirrors and pictures, and shrouding tables and chairs in white linen. The reason for this strange habit, something that would take an hour to install and a half-hour to dismantle, is never explained and the viewer is left to speculate as to the meaning of Tell's weird compulsion to cover all motel surfaces in white fabric. (There's a supremely irritating aspect to the movie: as in other Schrader scripts, the anti-hero provides a helpful voice-over in the first part of the movie. But when the protagonist has to take action that is suspenseful or on which his motivations might be obscure or problematic, the narration suddenly vanishes -- in other words, Schrader's use of voice-over monologue is purely opportunistic: we get lots of info. about card counting and poker strategy, but the anti-hero never tells us anything useful or plausible about his increasingly implausible motivations for his increasingly implausible actions. Schrader even has his protagonist keeping a journal ala Travis Bickel --but the guy never writes anything that would be helpful in deciphering his reasons for acting as he does in the second-half of the movie. Accordingly, the use of voice-over narration comes to seem a cheat, a sleight-of-hand -- if Tell is going to talk to us, why doesn't he explain his weird conduct in the second half of the picture.) In a way, The Card Counter is a buddy movie. At one gambling venue, a convention involving small-town cops, Tell meets an earnest young man, Balfour. For reasons that are inexplicable, the loner, Bill Tell, takes the kid under his wing and, in fact, offers to pay for his college debt -- like Joe Biden, we all know that tuition is too expensive. The kid's backstory is that his father committed suicide as a result of guilt over participating in torture in Iraq at Abu Ghraib and Bhagram. It turns out that Tell was an enthusiastic torturer at those hell-holes as well working under the tutelage of CIA spook and, then, private contractor, Gordo (played the ageless and always game Willem Dafoe.) The kid is planning to kidnap Gordo and torture him to death as revenge for his fathers' unhappy demise. Of course, Tell has a similar beef with Gordo. When the celebrated photos showing US troops torturing Iraquis surfaced, the poor bastards in the pictures were prosecuted and sent to prison (including Tell for his 8 1/2 year stint at Leavenworth) but the people who gave the orders and formulated the "enhanced interrogation" techniques, were all insulated from consequences. So Tell has his own reasons for wanting to punish Gordo, now a well-heeled government contractor, who is working on facial recognition metrics to detect lies told by suspects under interrogation. Tell is being courted by an enigmatic woman, Lalinda -- she wants Tell to join her "stable" of gamblers, men for whom she provides financial backing in exchange for a cut of the take. Tell likes to work below the radar, making only moderate earnings, but he succumbs to her blandishments (and, even, becomes briefly her boyfriend) in order to earn more money to finance his quixotic efforts to help young Balfour. Of course, Tell is unerring and makes a fortune on the professional gambling circuit. By this point, the movie has gone pretty much rogue -- it's off-the-rails. For some reason, Tell is obsessed with reuniting Balfour with his mother. He threatens to torture Balfour and the kid responds by, in fact, making contact with his estranged mom. But Balfour, then, goes to Gordo's mansion in the DC suburbs where he gets gunned down by the wily ex-spook. Tell is playing in the World Series of Poker (a sinister acronym WS - OP -- looks a bit like "Psy Op") against a hyper-patriotic adversary, a guy who shouts "USA! USA! whenever he wins a hand and dresses like Homelander in The Boys -- he goes around literally draped in an American flag. When Tell learns that his side-kick has been killed, he stalks out of the WS-OP and drives all night to Gordo's place. There he wraps everything in white sheets and invites Gordo to a torture party. The two men torture each other until the dawn's early light when Tell who is as good at torture as he is at card counting has killed Gordo. (He's badly injured himself.) Of course, the authorities aren't pleased with the torture party and Tell goes back to Leavenworth. In the final scene, Lalinda comes to visit him and plaintively touches the glass separating her from her boyfriend with her clawlike artificial fingernails.
The film is completely ridiculous. Schrader has the good sense to not show the torture party which would, of course, be risible. He does depict the horrors of Abu Ghraib using a fish-eye lens to survey a subterranean labyrinth in which the "greatest hits" of those atrocities are staged in tableaux form. It's all dishonest and meretricious. The Card Counter makes no sense even on the most primary levels as to motivation and plausibility -- why does the alienated loner, Tell, take an interest in Balfour? why does Balfour tag along with him for months on the poker circuit? What's with the torture party? Individual scenes don't make any sense. At one point, Tell tours some kind of spectacular light-show in what looks like an arboretum holding hands with Lalinda. The place is so wildly over-the-top that the viewer wants to know where they are and why everything is lit up with millions and millions of colored lights. There's nothing new in The Card Counter except the gimmick about wrapping everything in white linen. In fact, the film is close to a remake of Schrader's much better American Gigolo with Oscar Isaac playing the lonely, talented, and beautiful prostitute acted by Richard Gere in the 1980 picture. The movie has the same narrative arc and features Lalinda in the role of the procurer in Gigolo who dispatched Gere to his various gigs. The ending of the film, the encounter in the prison, replicates the last five minutes of American Gigolo in which Lauren Hutton, as an embodiment of spiritual Grace, comes to see Richard Gere in his prison cell -- that sequence was lifted whole from Bresson's Pickpocket (as Schrader has acknowledged) and remains Schrader's touchstone in The Card Counter made late in the director's life -- more than 40 years after American Gigolo (and 62 years after Bresson's 1959 masterpiece.) The movie is stylishly made, with impressive tracking shots through the rather squalid casinos frequented by the anti-hero, and it has some good songs on the soundtrack and a simmering rhythmic score a little like Giorgio Moroder's music in Gigolo. But the picture makes no sense and the gambling plot has little or nothing to do with the film's ambitious project to explore expiation for American guilt in the Gulf Wars. Schrader keeps making the same movie over and over again -- The Card Counter is also a remake of The Walker (2007) which reprised Gigolo -- and, each time, it seems with diminishing returns.
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