“The Card Counter” (2021) stars Oscar Isaacs as William Tell, the alias for a mysterious, lone gambler who attracts the attention of two people: La Linda (Tiffany Haddish), who is a talent scout in the gambling world that runs a stable of gamblers and gets investors to back her gamblers to increase the winnings, and Cirk (Tye Sheridan), a young man out for revenge who believes that William knew his father and offers to meet with him. Tell accepts their respective offers for a year and hopes that by the end, he can remove himself from the World Series of Poker tournament and make life better for all of them. Will Tell find redemption from his past sins?
“The Card Counter” is Paul Schrader’s most recent film, and his most mainstream popular movie was “First Reformed” (2016) starring Ethan Hawke. I became a Schrader fan after seeing “The Comfort of Strangers” (1990) starring Natasha Richardson, Rupert Everett, and Christopher Walken. Schrader films are characteristic of having an odd couple feel in the way that he explores how groups form and their dynamic, especially intergenerational, but also differing backgrounds. His gender dynamics are more traditional even if the power differential is reversed as it is in this film.
“The Card Counter” is Isaacs best film to date. Isaacs is a deft, versatile, and stunning actor, but the movies that he showcases can be uneven and not worthy of his talents. Isaacs is George Clooney without the smarm and overrated praise hurled at above average, but ultimately a mediocre body of work. Schrader gives Isaacs room to inhabit his internally tortured, violent, and demented character as he attempts to do an imitation of a normal person repressing a rage and self-loathing that reveals itself when confronted with revulsion. It is a great character study of a man trapped in a purgatory of his own making seeing a sliver of hope despite believing that he deserves it. It is one of Isaacs’ more subdued roles, and Haddish also seems muted. Did Schrader instruct them to use the Verfrendungseffekt usually employed in Wes Anderson and Yorgis Lanthimos’ films by actors speaking in monotone, so audiences are conscious of watching a film thus destroying the illusion that we are watching something organically unfold?
“The Card Counter” story uses a recent historical event as Tell’s backstory. I am reluctant to warn viewers ahead of time about the specific historic event because if I had known, I would not have watched this film, and it is a solid film. I just despise reliving events in a fictional setting instead of a documentary. Schrader employs two different visual styles to shoot the present and the past. Schrader uses a fisheye lens which distorts the past as if it was a funhouse that Pennywise run if It was into realism. It works, but it is also pat. If a person lived through that event and was subsequently punished, would we see such a smooth, collected, knowledgeable person? The premise is that Tell found a kind of solace in the structure of institutional life, which inspired him to replicate it as a secular spiritual practical to meditate. Repetition and routine give him calm and peace, but Tell also yearns for true punishment, instigates a mortification of his flesh and abstains from physical pleasures.
Still the way that Tell chooses to live is reminiscent of those mover and shaker gangster stories where the gangster is a smooth person who knows how everything operates and is like a curled-up snake ready to strike with effective, thinly veiled violence. Movies admire such characters, and Tell is as seductive as those figures. Both are morally repugnant. While this film distinguishes Tell from those characters because of how they acquired their experience in physical savagery and disapproves of Tell’s past, the film still admires them and simultaneously roots for Tell to let himself off the hook and unleash his brutality as a form of catharsis for the audience. It refuses to entirely give in to that impulse and only implies what he can do so it pumps the brakes on our blood lust, but does not extinguish it. We want to see what he is capable of, but such desires obliterate learning the lessons from past evils. If we think that he has skills that we admire, it creates a temptation to take the path that he did, which is the quandary that Cirk faces in the “The Card Counter,” the impulse to punish someone for doing something that he wants to do. Torture fantasies, which could be a synonym for movies, are inherently dangerous.
“The Card Counter” is the embodiment of Nietzsche’s famous quote, “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.” Tell tries to show Cirk how in over his head he is even in Cirk’s interactions with Tell, forget his ultimate target, John Gordo (Willem Dafoe), the mastermind who eluded the punishment that Tell accepted. “He’s all nails. You’re not.” Visually the film does a magnificent job of establishing how Tell became infected with institutional life with the color scheme that he adopts with the color of his clothes, his car, but when Cirk enters his life, the loud music of the past that Cirk loves disrupts Tell’s peace of muted colors (black, grey, white). It suggests that the past will never go away, and these practices won’t protect Tell from his worst impulses. My favorite scenes are when Cirk realizes that hanging out with Tell may not be a good idea, and even Tell’s most benevolent actions are threats.
“The Card Counter” is far from a perfect movie. Story elements were dropped that felt like portents but went nowhere. Was there a catch with the investors? No. It was reminiscent of “First Reformed” in that women exist to save men, give them a path to redemption and reunite them with the beauty of the world before their souls were crushed. On one hand, it is refreshing to have a black woman play that role because we are not usually the love interests or even romantic characters. Also Haddish is a gorgeous Amazon and not enough people remark on her beauty. On the other hand, can we not be a part of a movie culture that dehumanizes women and makes our existence solely devoted to a man’s personal growth? I am not saying that cannot be an element of a person’s journey, or there is not some truth to this dynamic, but you are telling me that his boss finds out his true story and most recent sins then thinks to herself, “That is cool. I can work with that.” Isaacs is hot, but is he that hot? Sorry Isaacs, no you are not. It would be a cautionary tale that she told at her next outing. Also did not he put her career in jeopardy with his shenanigans?
“The Card Counter” has some superb meta-audience surrogate flashes to critique the film. When Tell asks Cirk how he is enjoying their time together, Cirk replies, “It is all the same. You know it is so repetitive. I don’t really feel like its going anywhere.” During the denouement, after Tell does something unexpected, a gambler asks, “What’s going on?” I love when filmmakers express their doubts about the quality of the film within the narrative, but this time, I was commiserating with Schrader, not laughing at him. It helped me not to lose myself in the story’s rhythm, but remain conscience that the film had a point even when it was not apparent.
