The Card Counter

Year 15, Day 90 - 3/31/23 - Movie #4,391

BEFORE: Willem Dafoe carries over from "Nightmare Alley", and that makes three in a row for him, so he just made my year-end countdown, which is still over 200 movies away.  A number of other actors recently qualified for a year-end shout-out, like Tim Blake Nelson, Toni Collette, Michael B. Jordan, and John Turturro - but nobody yet is threatening Dale Dickey's lead, she's still the front-runner with 5 appearances. Right after Easter, though, I'm starting up another documentary chain, so things are about to get crazy.  Dale could easily lose her lead to someone like George W. Bush or Walter Cronkite!  I'll check back on this at the end of April. 

It's Day 31 (LAST DAY) of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, and today's themes are "Addiction & Recovery" (before 8 pm) and "Horror" (8 pm and after.) Here's the line-up: 

7:00 am "The Champ" (1979)

9:15 am "The Days of Wine and Roses" (1947)

11:30 am "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" (1958)

1:30 pm "Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman" (1947)

3:30 pm "I'll Cry Tomorrow" (1955)

5:45 pm "The Man With the Golden Arm" (1956)

8:00 pm "Psycho" (1960)

10:00 pm "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" (1931)

12:00 am "Poltergeist" (1982)

2:00 am "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" (1962)

4:15 am "Bride of Frankenstein" (1935)

I'm finishing strong with 8 seen out of 11 - I have NOT seen "Smash-Up", "I'll Cry Tomorrow" or the 1931 "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde".  But this takes me to 161 seen out of 352, so I'm finishing with 45.7% seen. That's better than two years ago, when I finished with just 40% seen, and last year, when I finished with 43.5%.

THE PLOT: This revenge thriller tells the story of an ex-military interrogator turned gambler, haunted by the ghosts of his past. 

AFTER: This film has the same cyclical nature as "Nightmare Alley", which began in a carnival, had a big second act in the fancy part of Buffalo, then ended in another carnival.  "The Card Counter" begins in a prison, has a big second act on the casino circuit, and then, well, you can probably guess from my tip-off where it ends up.  Honestly, I think I would have been fine if the film had left its main character playing poker and blackjack, moving from casino to casino, but well, another fate for him was in the cards, shall we say. 

I wasn't expecting the story to focus so much on the lead character's past as a soldier, one who worked in the Abu Ghraib prison, I kind of came here for the gambling, and then at some point the character's past caught up with him.  The director, Paul Schrader, is famous for directing films like "American Gigolo", "Affliction" and "Light Sleeper", and of course for writing "Taxi Driver", "Raging Bull" and "Bringing Out the Dead", so, you know, he's not exactly known for light romance and happy endings.  If you're expecting him to create a film where a guy plays cards well and wins a lot of money from casinos and does very well for himself, well, you've come to the wrong place.  Or maybe to the right place, but for the wrong reason.

The man who goes by the name "William Tell" learned to count cards while he was in prison - because let's face it, what else are you going to do there?  Read books, sure, but learning to count cards is a better use of your time.  Once he's released, he bounces from one casino to the next, never staying too long, careful not to win TOO big at blackjack for fear of drawing attention to himself.  Umm, so if his goal is to not win big, then why do it?  Ah, but this is a complex character, and his history seems to indicate that maybe he's not built for happiness or success.  Let's put a pin in that idea and circle back later, OK? 

Tell (an interesting pseudonym for a card player, right?) finds himself at a casino where some kind of security industry convention is taking place, and he attends a lecture given by a military man named Gordo, also he's confronted by a young man named Cirk who seems to recognize him from somewhere.  Cirk's been following Gordo around because he blames Gordo for the death of his father, who also was stationed at Abu Ghraib prison.  By coincidence, William Tell served at the same prison, and got in trouble for torturing Islamic inmates and posing for photos with them in embarrassing positions.  This is how Tell ended up in military prison in the first place, serving eight years while his commanding officer, Mr. Gordo, didn't get in trouble at all.

Since Cirk's father killed himself, Cirk wants Tell to help him track down Gordo, drive to his house and kidnap and torture him, just like he had the prisoners at Abu Ghraib tortured - yeah, I guess that tracks, but Tell offers him another option, to travel with him on the casino circuit, have fun and maybe earn some money.  They hook up with La Linda, who wants to sponsor Tell in the World Series of Poker and split the winnings - Tell refuses this at first, but changes his mind because he wants to pay off Cirk's college debt and maybe even pay for him to go back and finish getting his degree, plus Cirk's mother's deep in debt, too. I guess Tell feels somewhat responsible for what happened to Cirk's father, but since he's a good poker player, it's kind of hard to tell exactly what his motivations here are.

Tell's kind of a successor to Schrader's lead character from "Taxi Driver", Travis Bickle - he seems relatively normal on the surface, but he's really wound way too tight, and it doesn't take more than a small push to send him over the edge, and he's right back to being a creature of violence and a man who lives in a world of pain and nightmares. So yeah, this isn't a happy story but it is an interesting one. 

The IMDB lists the filming locations for this movie as Biloxi, Mississippi, but that sure looks like the Golden Nugget in Atlantic City to me - I recognized the fixtures that hang from their ceiling - it reminds me I haven't been to A.C. in a while, we last visited in June of 2022 - but pre-pandemic we probably went two or three times a year.  We agreed that we could not declare the COVID pandemic officially "over" until we were sitting in the Borgata buffet for breakfast on a Monday morning.  Well, we did that, so according to our rules, June 13, 2022 was the official end of the health crisis.  However, we saw a LOT of closed up businesses on the boardwalk, and several of our favorite restaurants in the casinos had vanished as a result of the lockdowns.  It makes sense, two years without any business, what restaurant could survive that?  We haven't been back since, because our last trip was such a bummer, but maybe by now a few more places have opened or re-opened. 

Also starring Oscar Isaac (last heard in "The Addams Family 2"), Tiffany Haddish (last seen in "Here Today"), Tye Sheridan (last seen in "Voyagers"), Alexander Babara (last seen in "The Hunt"), Bobby C. King, Ekaterina Baker, Bryan Truong, Dylan Flashner, Adrienne Lau, Joel Michaely (last seen in "The Rules of Attraction"), Rachel Michiko Whitney, Britton Webb, Amye Gousset with archive footage of Donald Rumsfeld. 

RATING: 6 out of 10 Delaware racinos