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VENICE 2021 Competition

Review: The Card Counter

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- VENICE 2021: Paul Schrader deals a great hand in this gambling tale that must be a good outside bet for the Golden Lion

Review: The Card Counter
Oscar Isaac in The Card Counter

If one plays their cards right in competition at the Venice Film Festival, it's possible to stumble into a Paul Schrader movie that bluffs its way into Michael Haneke territory. That's the roulette wheel of The Card Counter [+see also:
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, in which Oscar Isaac looks like the evil twin of George Clooney – he even has salt-and-pepper hair. Whenever he plays cards, he sports a grey shirt, black tie and leather jacket combo that has one wondering whether hair and make-up and the costume department were playing snap.

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Isaac's mystery-man character tells anyone and everyone who asks that he's called William Tell, the name of the legendary 14th-century Swiss expert marksman who assassinated an authoritarian leader, precipitating a rebellion. In this modern-day American tale, Tell spent his time doing a stretch in prison learning how to count cards and read books for the first time in his life, some of them Greek classics about myths. On the outside, he uses his newly developed skills to make a reasonable living in mediocre casinos. Every card is played after calculating the odds. The need for a risk assessment spills over into the rest of his life: when a motel receptionist offers him coffee, he calculates the odds of it being good or not by asking when it was brewed and checking out how much is left in the pot.

Schrader depicts a gambling world that's far from the glamour of Ocean’s Eleven. From his days writing classics such as Taxi Driver for Martin Scorsese (who has the opening executive-producer credit here) to his 2017 Venice hit First Reformed, Schrader has been a master of bringing the existential crises of troubled and traumatised men to the big screen. It's always good to bet on a Schrader movie when he keeps the female characters on the periphery. Although, here, he manages to hit the jackpot with a revelatory, straight, dramatic performance from hilarious comedienne Tiffany Haddish as La Linda. She wants Bill (or “B”, as she calls William) to play poker with her money, splitting the winnings. Also, La Linda poses a huge existential question for Tell: is he willing to accept the terrible odds for success and fall in love with her?

Another side story involves Tye Sheridan's Cirk, whom Will meets at a security talk delivered by Willem Dafoe's Major John Gordo. Cirk's father used to be in the army with Tell, who has PTSD from his time in Abu Ghraib. The PTSD flashback is revealed in an incredible travelling-camera shot featuring distorted, anamorphic images photographed by Alexander Dynan. Tell takes Cirk under his wing, showing him his rather unglamorous life, gambling and moving from motel to motel. It’s a device that allows the movie to follow the clichés of the gambling genre and inform novices in the audience of the stakes.

Schrader brings all of the themes together marvellously in a profound critique of the American psyche and the consequences of military action. The sexagenarian director's ace in the pack is a career-best performance by Isaac, which any sensible betting person will start backing for awards nominations.

The Card Counter is a US-UK-Chinese co-production staged by Braxton Pope, Astrakan Film AB and David Wulf. The co-producers are Saturn Streaming and Redline Entertainment, and it was made in association with LB Entertainment, Enriched Media Group Limited, Grandave Capital and One Two Twenty Entertainment. Its world sales are overseen by HanWay Films.

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