First Reformed really meant a lot for Paul Schrader’s career. It just about single-handedly rejuvenated his status as a cinema icon after nearly two decades of being obscured by his work making minimal impressions or else being flat-out panned. The visionary was diminished and the man who once wrote Taxi Driver was making VOD thrillers with Nicolas Cage. First Reformed turned things around though, receiving widespread acclaim and awards recognition, and it gave the then 72-year old Schrader a new lease on his filmmaking endeavours.
The Card Counter was very much made possible because of First Reformed. For the first-time in over a decade, a Schrader film has attracted A-list stars. And it seems he took to heart lessons learned from the success of First Reformed, because The Card Counter is yet another of what he calls his “man in a room” movies -stories about loner men grappling with their own morality in the face of a larger issue that drives them to extreme acts- albeit in a somewhat subverted form here. Oscar Isaac’s William Tell, a gambler as the name might allude to, isn’t troubled in the same way that Travis Bickle or Ernst Toller are, traumatized though he is by his past life: William Tillich as it happens, was one of the Abu Ghraib soldiers, who participated in the sadistic torture of Iraqi prisoners, and served a sentence in Leavenworth for it. He’s had a lot of time to sit with his actions, still haunted by them, and is determined to be a better man by leaving his military career behind him. His solitary existence now amounts to living out of motel rooms while going to casinos where his talent for counting cards earns him a modest living -he has no interest in higher stakes games or wealth or celebrity. A man with similar baggage to Schraders’ other characters, but more contented and confident in his ethics.
Still, there’s a part of that torturer still alive in his consciousness, and it threatens to come out when Tell is confronted by the son of another Abu Ghraib soldier, Cirk (Tye Sheridan), who wants violent revenge on the major (Willem Dafoe) who inducted both his father and Tell into the brutality (and spearheaded much of it), but who managed to evade consequences. Schrader plays around a little with your familiarity for his mode of character arc, teasing the assumption that Tell is tempted to partake in this vengeance -but he’s really not. Instead, he takes Cirk under his wing as a means of steering him onto a better path -asserting himself as a de facto father figure to replace the abusive one who ultimately killed himself.
It’s a difficult relationship, Tell just as disturbed by Cirk’s violent determination as by what he went through both in Abu Ghraib and Leavenworth -yet he persists in setting a better example, taking Cirk on the road with him and fellow gambler La Linda (Tiffany Haddish) as he enlists in the Poker World Series -largely to earn money for Cirk. In particular he’s concerned about Cirk’s dispassionate attitude towards his mother, who left his father due to the abuse, but whom Cirk never cared to check in on.
Against all of this is a sharp portrait of the world of professional gambling -one which hones in on the scope and the class of it, but also its’ gaudiness. Tell runs into more than a few big characters, the most notable being an obnoxious jingoist in an American flag cape with his own entourage shouting “U.S.A.” on repeat. Nobody likes this certain metaphor for America itself, but like America he just keeps showing up to draw attention to himself. Tell’s narration outlines the various workings of the gambling scene, its’ terminology, practices, and how he counts cards, interspersed with comments of inner thoughts and musings. It’s quite clear Schrader did a lot of research, or else knew this world to some degree already, as he asks you to ponder why Tell chose this way of life to immerse himself in. Why he stays exclusively in off-site motels, covering all the furniture in white sheets as to avoid leaving any trace of his presence, why he writes a journal, and why he sat however briefly at that convention where the despicable Major Gordo spoke -where he met Cirk.
Schrader is interested in some of these questions -others he merely poses out of obligation. There’s no reason for Tell to write this intricate, thoughtful journal by hand other than that it hearkens back to the kinds of movies Schrader loves. As was the case with First Reformed, the movie is full of little homages to classics of world cinema, from minimalist shot compositions that once again evoke Bergman’s Winter Light or Chantal Akerman, to an ending that is just a direct lift from Robert Bressons’ Pickpocket –Schrader’s favourite film. Certainly though beyond the references the film is artistically striking. The long takes and mise en scene and editing that juxtaposes the real and the fictional (Tell beating a prisoner is cut against Donald Rumsfeld advocating “enhanced interrogation”) is consistently enticing –Schrader’s use of a fish-eye lens for nightmare flashbacks to the atrocities is nicely discomforting as well. And bristling music by Robert Levon Been keeps the film hypnotizing even when the subject matter is at its’ most banal. That is a weaker spot of the film though –its’ script is not terribly interesting, and honestly shallow in a few places. There’s none of the urgency of First Reformed, and chunks of the dialogue sound unnaturally bizarre. Schrader’s comments at times may be too on the nose.
There’s a sense also of the film in spite of its’ nuanced portrait of the man and clear disgust with Bush-era policies on terrorism, of being too kind to a heinous war criminal. Schrader’s stance seems to firmly be that the systems behind Abu Ghraib and other torture centres are more to blame for what went on there than the individuals themselves –these systems represented by military command figures like Gordo. There’s certainly truth to that, but Schrader comes dangerously close to absolving the people like Tell of their responsibilities. Tell may be remorseful, but he would be one of the few. Yet to his credit, Schrader doesn’t let Tell off the hook, exposing that darkness he’s still capable of in one frightful scene between him and Cirk, in which he sinks to a last resort to motivate Cirk onto the right path. Oscar Isaac is very good throughout, but in these last parts he is exceptional as Tell’s moral fortitude begins to break down –the world he had tried to escape reclaiming him.
That central thrust is what saves The Card Counter in the end, a movie that is overall a touch too familiar for Schrader, written rather obliquely, and often less cinematically exciting than it is fascinating –but it is very fascinating! And I think its’ contemplations are well worth investigation -it’s not like the U.S. ever really stopped the torture after all.
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