The Card Counter – first-look review

Here are the rules for the Card Counter drink­ing game. When you see a char­ac­ter take a drink in the film, you have to match them. Tom Collins with Tan­quer­ay. Dou­ble Jack Daniels. Dou­ble John­nie Walk­er. Man­hat­tan. Soda water. Beer. First you get that buzz which turns to mild eupho­ria, and then the nas­ties kick in and the sick­ness starts to rise.

It emu­lates the expe­ri­ence of watch­ing Paul Schrader’s rol­lock­ing new spin on his God’s Lone­ly Man project, this time focus­ing on Bill Tillich (aka William Tell), played by Oscar Isaac (eas­i­ly his best per­for­mance since Inside Llewyn Davis), a man with a past who just likes to wrap his table lamps in bed sheets and play a bit of poker.

With his slicked back hair, omnipresent don­key jack­et, kha­ki-green slacks and over­sized Ray Bans, he’s a Melvil­lian ex-con who end­ed up enjoy­ing his time in chokey where he caught up on his Mar­cus Aure­lius and taught him­self to count cards. He now seems to want to emu­late the claus­tro­pho­bic expe­ri­ence of incar­cer­a­tion on the out­side: turn­ing every day into a dron­ing­ly monot­o­nous trip from one tin­pot casi­no to the next where he keeps his head down, bets small, wins small and is able to keep him­self to himself.

Visu­al­ly, Schrad­er shoots for extreme asceti­cism, with casi­no floors made to resem­ble the gun-met­al aus­ter­i­ty of a prison rec room. And that’s just how William likes it – no muss, no fuss, in, out and on to the next one, a life of mod­est goals achieved and repeat­ed dai­ly. That is until he wan­ders into a secu­ri­ty con­fer­ence and sits in on a pre­sen­ta­tion deliv­ered by retired Major John Gor­do (Willem Dafoe), an old acquain­tance from his past. Tye Sheridan’s schlub­by twen­tysome­thing Cirk with a ​“C” (aka The Kid) recog­nis­es William and pass­es him his deets. Turns out he’s got crosshairs trained on Gor­do and needs some extra cap­i­tal to achieve his fantasy.

As with most of Schrader’s work – but specif­i­cal­ly his excel­lent 2017 film First Reformed – the French for­mal­ist film­mak­er Robert Bres­son is the key influ­ence on The Card Counter, main­ly in the puri­tan­i­cal rigour of the sto­ry­telling and the per­for­mances, but also in how it grap­ples with the mys­ti­fy­ing and con­tra­dic­to­ry aspects of morality.

While it appears at some points to be a direct­ly polit­i­cal film about the lega­cy of America’s dead­ly incur­sions into the Mid­dle East, this turns out just to be the con­text for William’s press­ing desire for redemp­tion. And in his Zen-like way, he sees redemp­tion as a twofold thing: he has to save some­one else as well as him­self, and that some­one else is the com­bustible Cirk.

It’s a supreme­ly com­pelling tale leav­ened by its wry humour and a sub­tle com­men­tary on the essen­tial empti­ness of Amer­i­can life. Indeed, the only tru­ly suc­cess­ful char­ac­ters in the film are one of William’s reg­u­lar pok­er oppo­nents, a Ukrain­ian man styled as Mr USA who, along with a pair of lack­eys, chants, ​“U‑S-A! U‑S-A!” every­where he’s seen. Tiffany Had­dish turns in a fine per­for­mance as a svelte cir­cuit reg­u­lar, and draws out an unlike­ly strain of poignan­cy from the oth­er­wise samu­rai-focused Bill. Though it nev­er feels like Schrad­er is blast­ing some­one for cre­at­ing this awful world, he is say­ing that peo­ple can be com­fort­able and accept­ing of suf­fer­ing and boredom.

A crack­er­jack finale leads to the film’s bit­ter­sweet final shot, which ref­er­ences Michelangelo’s Sis­tine Chapel fres­co ​‘The Cre­ation of Adam’ and encap­su­lates so much about Schrader’s cin­e­ma, in every­thing from way back to the days of Taxi Dri­ver. It’s that idea of tran­scen­dence and puri­ty remain­ing just out of reach. The fin­gers almost con­nect, but they nev­er do.

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