The Card Counter
Directed by Paul Schrader
Running time: 1hr52 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE
The Card Counter, starring Oscar Isaac
Oscar Isaac has had a good Venice Film Festival. From a low-key sexy performance as Timothée Chalamet’s daddy in Dune, to a high-key sexy performance opposite Jessica Chastain in a Scenes From A Marriage red carpet clip that went viral on Twitter, this is an actor who knows how to deliver sex, in at least two different keys.
But sexual vibes are not a major part of the hand dealt to him The Card Counter, and Isaac does something interesting with that absence. I think this is the sort of role for which some actors — Matthew McConaughey, say — would have attempted a physical transformation, to off-set their actorly looks and underline the alienated nature of the character. Isaac plays William Tell (intertextual jokes, like his name, or his hotel room number being 101, are rife), a low-status former Guantanamo Bay guard, who was successfully prosecuted for his part in the abuse that went on there, and who spent his subsequent time in prison honing his skills with a deck of cards. Instead of conveying his brokenness through a physical transformation, Isaac simply plays that absence, turning the dial way down on his natural charisma, and projecting the aura of a dulled piece of matte-surface surgical steel, which exists, functional and stark, but does not sparkle or shine or smoulder.
William’s voiceover (which lightly calls to mind the voiceover in Schrader’s all-timer, Taxi Driver) leaves little room for doubt: he kinda liked his life in prison. The regularity of life inside, the routine, the predictability — this is a man traumatised by the trauma he enacted on others, groping for some kind of reason and order, which he finds in rules like the mathematical probabilities involved in blackjack. His interest in the possibility of romance with La Linda (Tiffany Haddish), a woman who runs a stable of gamblers, feels perfunctory. I would ordinarily never suggest that there should be less of Tiffany Haddish in a movie (for example, Bad Trip could only have been improved with more of her scaring the shit out of Eric André and Lil Rel Howery), but I never felt that William would be up for the messiness and unpredictability of romance, of any sort. In every other dimension of his life, he’s focused on order, on odds he can predict. He cuts across other people’s sentences a couple of times, not because the character is rude or boorish, but because, like a hand of cards, he can predict with confidence how the sentence is likely to play out and anticipates it, with successful anticipation being the zone he now most likes to occupy. This character is the entire film, and everything outside of him felt slightly extraneous to me, the mark of both an intriguing character study and an actor currently playing his cards with rare skill.
THE CARD COUNTER (2021) Written by Paul Schrader | Shot by Alexander Dynan | Edited by Benjamin Rodriguez Jr.
Selected for the Competition at the 78th Venice Film Festival
