The Card Counter: Oscar Isaac simmers as a card shark with a past in this festival film that bypassed TIFF
By Jim Slotek
Rating: B-plus
A tale of trauma told, fittingly, with a poker face, Paul Schrader’s The Card Counter is a sure-handed rumination on redemption and finding peace of mind.
It’s also a reminder, for those who’ve forgotten or not noticed, that Oscar Isaac is a masterful actor. He can move an audience with a performance where he seems to be doing almost nothing, seldom changing his expression, registering surprise with the rise of an eyebrow, occasionally revealing what lies beneath with narrative.
Oscar Isaac as the pseudonymous “William Tell” in The Card Counter.
(For those struggling to get tickets for Toronto International Film Festival features, be apprised that The Card Counter debuted last week at TIFF’s rival, the Venice Film Festival. It’s not on the TIFF program, but it deserves to be. The good news is tickets for this will be far easier to come by).
Isaac plays an ex-military man with a recent prison history, who draws a straight line between his life behind bars and his itinerant post-prison life as an expert card counter, playing under the punny pseudonym of “William Tell.”
Schrader makes the philosophical connection between the predictability and ritual of daily prison life and the same conditions at a casino card table. Gambling, oddly, does not reward crazy risk taking, but can pay off if you don’t deviate from the repetitive formulae.
Determined to fly under the radar, “Bill” flits between smalltime casinos, happily taking them for small amounts so as not to call attention to himself while paying for motel rooms, bourbon and car expenses.
His plan has flaws, however. Not one but two people spot him. A flirty operator named La Linda (Tiffany Haddish) has seen him at work, recognizes his talent for card counting at blackjack and reading players’ eyes in Texas Hold ‘Em. She’s puzzled by his history of small bets. A broker for rich people who back high-stakes players, she offers to make him part of her stable. He initially refuses.
PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN
He is also called out by a young t-shirted Gen Z named Cirk (“Kirk with a C”), played sulkily by Tye Sheridan. Cirk, thereafter called “the kid” spots Bill as an ex-con from a military jail, who’d been convicted for his role in torturing suspects in the Iraqi prison at Abu Ghraib. This explains his desire to gamble under the radar. The kid, whose own late father was another Abu Ghraib convict, is obsessed with the fact that only soldiers were jailed and not their commanding officers. His sketchily drawn plan is to kidnap the erstwhile Abu Ghraib CO (Willem Dafoe), now a private military contractor, and torture him to death.
Bill wants no part of this plan either. But something in the kid’s story seems to speak to him, and with neither of them having anything better to do, he invites him along on his casino tour and reconnects with La Linda to take her up on her offer (for reasons he initially keeps to himself, but romance is in the air).
The part of Schrader’s plot that strains credulity is Bill’s notion of avoiding celebrity. The real Abu Ghraib enlistees’ who were imprisoned had a notoriety that already approached celebrity (I still remembered the name Lynndie England 17 years later without googling it).
But it’s a quibble alongside the quiet power of the tale. Schrader juggles his dual themes well, war crime memories shot through a fish-eye lens, juxtaposed with the blinding lights of the casinos (the last act takes place at the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas). The melancholy soundtrack tunes by Robert Levon Been add to the build-up.
And his innate understanding of the card table dynamic seems spot-on. Early in the movie, there’s a “For Dummies” explanation of card-counting that is so easy to follow, I may actually get tossed from the next casino I’m at.
The Card Counter. Written and directed by Paul Schrader. Starring Oscar Isaac, Tiffany Haddish and Tye Sheridan. Opens in theatres, Friday, September 10.