Skip to main content

Ballad of a Small Player is a Vivid, Indulgent, and Trifling Moral Fable

The character at the centre of Edward Berger’s Ballad of a Small Player feels quite weak and artificial as we are introduced to him. A character that really doesn’t suit Colin Farrell, who seems to struggle with both the aristocratic affect and the accent itself that feels like a two-bit imitation of Ralph Fiennes. It was not coming together. And then, roughly twenty minutes in, the Irish comes out, the facade is dropped and the movie starts looking up, until you have to reckon with what it is actually doing.
Ballad of a Small Player is a step down in thematic scale for Berger, being a more intimate story than either his previous English films All Quiet on the Western Front and Conclave, and yet it is set against a world more grandiose and opulent than either of those could aspire towards. Shot on location in Macau, it spends a lot of time in its stylish casinos, luxurious penthouses and elegant restaurants, creating an intense image of wealth and excess, delectable until it is nauseating, and certainly in no way sustainable. A world that is easy to be hypnotized by, Berger finding a kind of horror in it that is thrilling where he remembers to entertain it. This is not a frequent occurrence.
Farrell’s character is introduced as Lord Doyle, his presence, prestige, and confidence in the casinos of Macau not always matched (in fact frequently undercut) by his luck as a gambler. He’s managed to make the most of his occasional wins, living luxuriously out of penthouses and enjoying every refinement that comes his way, but it is a limited stroke of fortune that he can comprehend though not admit. He befriends one casino employee Dao Ming (Fala Chen), an intelligent and charismatic woman attracted to a sense of subdued kinship in their histories as she touches on his vulnerable humanity. Unfortunately, Lord Doyle is eventually spotted by Cynthia (Tilda Swinton), an agent connected with a manhunt for him after he -really an Irish former lawyer named Reilly- absconded with the fortune of a deceased wealthy woman who had entrusted him with her estate. He is given the choice of paying back his debts within a set time frame or being arrested and deported, the start of an intense and nebulous reckoning with his vices and guilt.
The film is incredibly subjective for Berger, even compared to All Quiet on the Western Front -we spend the entirety of the film close-in on Reilly and his moral, psychological strife. And that is quite literal -a lot of intimate close-ups including several in very unflattering lights. But even beyond a certain aesthetic abrasiveness, his is not a pleasant or encouraging vantage point to be in: pathologically self-destructive and self-pitying, with a conscience, though not one that springs into action until he is under the pressure. Generally just a guy with a very limited integrity, and this translates through the duration of his arc. Farrell plays the part with extreme dedication, caked in sweat and sickly looking throughout the movie, but he struggles to convey Reilly’s sense of humanity beyond a sense of self-preservation, until perhaps the very end when he has to face up to some dramatic consequences. The Lord Doyle persona is rightly called out as dumb and unbelievable, but his assumption of that character feels in line with an understated callousness that only wavers in a few tender scenes with Dao Ming, whom he views as both a romantic interest and a saviour. Chen is great, and does give pathos to her own unfortunate background, layering her performance with a kind of enigmatic serenity that draws the audience to her in the same way it does Reilly. Her role in the story is ultimately its most captivating facet.
Her scenes especially, but really much of the movie wholesale has a dreamlike spell cast over it -some of it again a manifestation of Reilly’s perspective and unreliable psyche as both his ruse and his demons close in on him. In the latter part of the movie he hallucinates himself as a Taotie, a mythological figure of voracious gluttony and excess -a reminder of the peril of his indulgences, especially after a reprieve that nearly seemed to reform him. That segment too though, away from Macau, has a misty air that doesn’t entirely feel real. It is a curious atmosphere, especially as applied by Berger, and it does suit the kaleidoscope of almost otherworldly wealth and opulence that is Macau. But as hypnotic as this texture is, it acts as mere filter for the relatively shallow character drama, and is a bit lessened by association. The same is true of the film’s colour schemes, as rich in places as its setting, doubtless meant to sell more that state of luxury and temptation to the viewer -which perhaps it does too well. Unlike what the movie does with its fineries of food, the aesthetics of space are never warped into something unappealing.
‘Too much is never enough’ appears to be the movie’s intended screed. It is somewhat the core of gambling addiction -there’s always more to win, more riches to obtain. And the film does an adequate job conveying the inherent emptiness in that, how the status symbol of it all is more important to Reilly than any material worth -he is positively bored by his luxuries, even as he gorges on them in the hope of finding some nebulous value. Yet all it does is rip away his humanity. It is a potent theme that plays out in a highly operatic way, especially through Reilly’s last temptation phase of his arc. Yet he does succumb, and pulls free in only a fairly mild and unremarkable way. His doing so is tinged also with a personal motivation that somewhat lessens its gravity, especially in lieu of a twist designed to make it more meaningful but only making it look like his psyche was tricked into doing the right thing. It also is an arbitrarily depressing development, much as it is forecast. Again Reilly the character gets in the way of the film sticking its otherwise strong virtues.
Berger makes his Ballad of a Small Player look good, but he is less comfortable with its degree of hypnotic chaos and is unable to bring much to the moments of tenderness that act as relief to that. The great shift in subject and tone from his last couple movies is an admirably bold thing and it does push Farrell to some hitherto unseen lengths for him as an actor. But while its thematic and stylistic choices are alluring, the dimness of its subjective drama hurts its capacity to be fully engaging. It can be a wild ride, but that means tuppence with a protagonist who inspires so little sympathy and an ultimately banal moral trajectory predicated on a relatively simplistic gambling addition ethos. Macau looks great though, yet I can’t help thinking that too is part of the problem.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Strange History of the American Spoof Movie

Parody movies have been around for a lot longer than we tend to think of them. Even from the earliest days of Hollywood there were movies meant to satirize a particular subject or genre. In the silent era, Buster Keaton was responsible for a few. And in the early sound era, almost as soon as the monster pictures took off did you see comic versions of them -Abbott and Costello hosting a few. But parody movies tended to be subtle for most of cinema history, or parody came in conjunction with another goal of the comedy. It really wasn’t until the 1980s and 90s that it took off and became popularly understood. And there is perhaps a line to be drawn to the counterculture comedy explosion that began in the 1970s through avenues like  Saturday Night Live , which frequently parodied from even its earliest years popular movies and cultural properties of the time. But that is still a way’s back. To my generation though, ‘parody movie’ is perhaps a less known term than the more blunt ‘s...
1 comment
Read more

A Stylish and Charmingly Reinvented David Copperfield

The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery (Which He Never Meant to Publish on Any Account)  is the most important book Charles Dickens ever wrote. It is not the most famous or influential by any means (that would of course be A Christmas Carol ), but it is the book that is the purest expression of the authors’ style, identity, and worldview. It is his most personal work, semi-autobiographical in its story of the chronology from infancy to adulthood of a character who overcomes great loss and hardships to find a fulfilling life as a writer. To read David Copperfield  is to understand Dickens himself. Armando Iannucci knew this when he decided to make a new adaptation of the novel for a twenty-first century audience. He also knew that Dickens adaptations are ubiquitous at this point. Films are a bit rarer, but every few years a new television adaptation rears its head to keep the authors’ unique world an...
Post a Comment
Read more

Notes on the Title Cards of The Lord of the Rings

It might be sacrilege for one who both considers The Lord of the Rings  trilogy to be one of the greatest triumphs of cinema and has been an avid lover of the films since adolescence, to declare that the original theatrical cuts of the films are better than the much beloved extended editions. Easily it’s my most controversial opinion regarding these movies. Don’t get me wrong, I do like the extended editions quite a lot, especially as someone who just enjoys spending time in that universe. They flesh it out more, add extra flavour, and in increasing the length by about an hour really emphasize the epic quality of these films. But I find that the original cuts are generally more cleanly paced, more seamlessly edited, and much more accessible to audiences. All the stuff there is to love about The Lord of the Rings  is there in the original versions, the plethora of new and extended scenes merely add to that for fans. And of those, they fall into three camps for me: 1....
14 comments
Read more