The Card Counter (2021, dir: Paul Schrader)

[sevendaughters]

MAN COUNTS CARDS BUT DO THEY MEAN THE GAMBLING ONES OR THE ONES THAT FATE HAS STACKED FOR US?



- Bruising character-actor-gone-big du jour Oscar Isaac stars as a fairly low-key blackjack card counter (who is also very good at poker, which is not a card counting game, but let us brush past this!) with a troubled past!
- Tye Sheridan, who has been in 26 films I have not seen because they look TERRIBLE, plays wandering dropout second banana as a stranger who stirs up the emotions of our lead!
- Tiffany Haddish plays a bubbly leader of a stable of gamblers but there's no girlboss stuff here, she's very good and I wish there was more of her in it!
- Willem Dafoe plays a character that I can't talk about in case I veer into spoiler land but he's good, he's dependable, it's Dafoe!

I don't hugely rate Schrader as a director (Mishima aside) but his writing, whilst very much tied in with certain key themes, is sharp. This was a good wet Friday cinema visit and the whole thing trotted along nicely. Not into the ending, and there were some small mis-steps, but ultimately I was "engaged" and thought the symbolic/political content was nicely handled. A couple of shots, for a film that is mostly composed of gently ironic looks at how dull glamourous American casinos are, took my breath away.

As I was leaving a couple were behind me and she said "well it wasn't the WORST thing I've ever seen but..." and I missed the rest.

[Noodle Lizard]

I started a thread on this, but yours is far prettier! I'll copy my little review in here:

Well, that was a disappointment. Perhaps it might have been better to read a little about it first, because it wasn't at all what I expected.

What it is, though, is two completely different films melded together into something not quite as good as either might have been on their own merits. I'm actually struggling to see how the gambling and titular "card counting" conceit even fits in with the wider story or characterisation - it's presented as if it should, but I'm really not sure it does.

It's shot well enough, and the acting's fine I suppose, but it felt like no one was sure what they were doing this for. "Inconsistent" is the best word I could use to describe it. The ending is absolutely meaningless. The soundtrack is incredibly boring, too, as if Schrader searched for "things that sound like Radiohead but are cheap" and just ran with what he found.

Sad to say it, but it's closer to the "shit" end of my prediction than the "rather good" end.

I'd be interested to hear some more positive takes on it, though. I'd always prefer to give Schrader a fair chance.

[chveik]

i love that half of schrader's filmography is made of Bresson remakes

[sevendaughters]

i love that half of schrader's filmography is made of Bresson remakes

There's a bit of disembodied narrator whilst looking at the person narrating straight out of Pickpocket.

[Bence Fekete]

As someone who plays a decent amount of poker those narrative riffs by Tell came across as mundane, bar-bore, slowly losing Saturday night bad reg levels of poker mansplaining. I couldn't stop thinking Schrader had read the back of a few of the main poker psychology books on the hols and contrived to smuggle in a hundred dull platitudes and, well, maybe it is interesting if you haven't heard them before but for me the entire character felt unbelievable and fiercely misconstructed. Mississippi Grind, dare I say it, Rounders, and the excellent Molly's Game all do a much better job of capturing poker/professional gambler nous; films you felt TCC wanted so badly to emulate.

The bromance was contrived and made no sense. The 'mission' made no sense and felt exploitative and inevitable. One of those movies you're praying something other than the obvious all-characters-triangulate conclusion happens. 

As it turns out the climatic scenes weren't as bad as feared, and I wish I could've liked it more given I really enjoyed First Reformed which is somewhat tonally similar, but TCC felt like a half-baked chore for 80% of its runtime.

[sevendaughters]

As someone who plays a decent amount of poker those narrative riffs by Tell came across as mundane, bar-bore, slowly losing Saturday night bad reg levels of poker mansplaining. I couldn't stop thinking Schrader had read the back of a few of the main poker psychology books on the hols and contrived to smuggle in a hundred dull platitudes and, well, maybe it is interesting if you haven't heard them before but for me the entire character felt unbelievable and fiercely misconstructed. Mississippi Grind, dare I say it, Rounders, and the excellent Molly's Game all do a much better job of capturing poker/professional gambler nous; films you felt TCC wanted so badly to emulate.

A couple of moments were cribbed from a Doyle Brunson book I read about 20 years ago. I take what you're saying (Molly's Game came to mind during the film, I didn't like that much) but I thought it constructed a better/less glamorous mise-en-scene of professional gamble grind; all those sad and unlovely places pretending to be the ultimate in something.

I tried not to see it as a gambling picture anyway: that said I had a bit of a "oh Americans shooting/torturing and crying about it again, how great" when they connected it to the traumatic aspect.

[Noodle Lizard]

As someone who plays a decent amount of poker those narrative riffs by Tell came across as mundane, bar-bore, slowly losing Saturday night bad reg levels of poker mansplaining. I couldn't stop thinking Schrader had read the back of a few of the main poker psychology books on the hols and contrived to smuggle in a hundred dull platitudes and, well, maybe it is interesting if you haven't heard them before but for me the entire character felt unbelievable and fiercely misconstructed. Mississippi Grind, dare I say it, Rounders, and the excellent Molly's Game all do a much better job of capturing poker/professional gambler nous; films you felt TCC wanted so badly to emulate.

Not to mention that the titular "card counting" really isn't an especially useful skill in poker. I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to say that you get a kind of Big Short-esque tutorial on card counting in blackjack towards the beginning of the film, but then the actual important(?) gambling scenes are all to do with poker. And I'm still struggling to see how any of that really connected (metaphorically or otherwise) with the "ACTUAL PLOT".

I think it's fair to objectively say the film's a bit of a mess, even if you're lucky enough to be able to form something meaningful out of it.

[zomgmouse]

This was great. I loved it all, obviously Schrader leans into his lonely men a lot and this is no exception but it gets played out exceptionally well. It's an interesting parallel to Taxi Driver in a way where

Spoiler alert

in that we get a hint that Travis Bickle served in Vietnam whereas here it goes into full Abu Ghraib flashback territory

[close]

. USA! USA! USA! To me it seemed very simple on the surface but a lot of interesting characterisation underneath and the retrospective inevitability of the ending was brilliant.