The Perfect Predictability of Gambling Movies
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/05/magazine/the-perfect-predictability-of-gambling-movies.html
Last winter, I found myself in card clubs again. Maybe every 10th or 11th day, nothing too disturbing. I haven’t been a good card player for years; at some point, you simply accept that you’re not playing to win, at least not to win consistently. This might sound like a problem, but when you’re losing only what you can afford to lose, the guilt can be rationalized away. You could have paid for a nice dinner and a nice bottle (or two) of wine with the money you lost tonight, but that dinner would have lasted only two hours at most, and you played cards for six hours – and so forth.
On one of these nights, I met a 23-year-old kid who grew up in my hometown. He told me that he had dropped out of college after his freshman year to have a go at professional poker. He was doing pretty well, all things considered — he made enough money to pay rent, buy clothes and attend music festivals. What else does a 23-year-old need in New York City?
This kid beat me in a hand for about $180 that night, but we formed a friendship. I would text him, and he would invariably be playing somewhere in the city, and I would head down, dump a few chips and talk to him about hand strategy, game selection, poker theory — all the things I was interested in when I was a younger, more optimistic card player. We took a few road trips to Atlantic City, where we were comped rooms thanks to the off-season and urban decay. He would almost always win, and although I wasn’t winning or losing any more than usual, I felt, for the first time in years, the insane yet pleasant hope that I might start winning. The kid made it seem possible.
In July, he went to Las Vegas to play in the World Series of Poker. I staked part of his buy-in to one of the tournaments, and he sent me updates throughout his run to a respectable finish in the money. Then, for the next five days, I didn’t hear from him at all. Anyone who has watched a gambling movie knows what happened to the kid in Vegas and can guess what kept happening once he got back to New York.
Every gambling story ends the same way. This, oddly enough, is what makes it the perfect narrative for movies. The American epic requires an easy binary, preferably one that connotes complexity without actually being complex. All of gambling’s conflicts — the swings between debt and no debt, the blunt debauchery and the blunter piety — can be clearly broadcast across Paul Newman’s beautiful face. The director of a gambling film really needs only an actor who suffers well and the courage to clear everything else off the table.
Plot lines within the genre are simple by necessity. There is really only one: the gambler falls into debt; the gambler goes after one big score to get even; the gambler either does or does not get even. The variations on that story depend, mostly, on whether the filmmaker sees gambling as a catastrophic vice or a charming hustle.
The catastrophe variant is exemplified by Robert Altman’s “California Split,” a relentlessly bleak film that follows Elliott Gould and George Segal through one big degenerate swing. Segal meets Gould while playing cards in Southern California. Segal begins to believe Gould is his good-luck charm. Segal falls into debt. Segal and Gould head to Reno to try to get even. Altman offers his protagonists no quarter. The entire film, shot in his capacious, chatty style, is saddled with an unexpected moral alarmism — you can almost hear the director’s bitter exhalations in the background.
Altman is so focused on squalor and hopelessness — the mute dealers, the lounge singer with the smoke-ravaged voice, the janitor who, while sweeping the casino floor, pumps quarters into a slot machine — that he misses the small moments of humanity among degenerates. From my own years in those same card rooms in Los Angeles, I can report that things might be terrible, but they are not quite so theatrically terrible. Most of the time passed in boredom and desperation is muted; it hangs and sags. In Altman’s vision, sadness crackles at the edges of every shot.
The modern poker classic “Rounders” has a beautiful, suffering face (this time provided by Edward Norton, playing a card hustler recently released from prison), but the film’s director and writers don’t let him languish quite so long. Norton and Matt Damon — playing Norton’s childhood friend — share some laughs, go into debt and need a dramatic upswing to make them whole again. But everything in “Rounders” sparkles a bit too brightly. The poker rooms, even the grim ones, are shot in dramatic light, the regular gamblers pay their children’s private-school bills, the dealers are Famke Janssen, Damon’s hero is a promising law student at Columbia.
Rather than conclude with a declaration of gambling’s perpetual hopelessness, “Rounders” ends with a bright-eyed, determined Damon on his way to Las Vegas to play in the World Series of Poker. The moral of “California Split,” memorably snarled by Elliott Gould in the film’s final scene, is: ”None of it meant anything, did it?” “Rounders,” by contrast, ends with Damon’s saying: “First prize at the World Series of Poker is a million bucks. Does it have my name on it? I don’t know. … But I’m gonna find out.” We aren’t supposed to feel inspired, exactly, but we are at least expected to wish him luck.
“The Hustler,” the landmark 1961 pool hall film, sidles in somewhere between “California Split” and “Rounders.” Fast Eddie Felson is the most charming of the bunch (owing, in no small part, to Paul Newman’s good looks, which are on full display here), but he also withholds the most. His secrets stay secret. When he finally gets over in the film’s last scene, he looks at his vanquished rival, Minnesota Fats, and says, “Fat man, you play a beautiful game of pool.” Felson’s hustling days might be over, but he still appreciates the game. There is a glimmer of dignity there.
The degenerate who falls deeper into degeneracy; the triumphant cardsharp who finally beats the house; the hustler who wants to play for the love of the game over the love of the gamble. Of these three, only the degenerate reflects reality. The cardsharp and the reformed hustler are the degenerate’s pornography. All three are “real,” insofar as the pornography is what keeps the degenerate going. He does not exist if not for this glimmer of false hope.
“Mississippi Grind,” the latest entry in the litany of American gambling movies, borrows from all three of these archetypes. The film follows a down-and-out gambler named Gerry (Ben Mendelsohn) and his new friend, Curtis (Ryan Reynolds), as they take a gambling trip down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. The setup is familiar — Gerry owes money to everyone around town, so when Curtis shows up and inspires a short-lived change of luck, Gerry corrals his new friend and pulls up stakes in search of a run of hot cards.
Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, the writers and directors of “Mississippi Grind,” clearly know their genre inside out. Mendelsohn might not have a beautiful face, but no one suffers quite as haggardly or as creepily as he does. The film is a collection of references and homages that hover, satellite-like, around whatever torment happens to be passing across Mendelsohn’s face. But like a basketball team that signs a huge star without building a team around him, Boden and Fleck seem far too content to coast on the idea of Mendelsohn-as-degenerate, without giving him a fully developed film to inhabit. It feels as if Boden and Fleck present us with rote gambling scenes and a rote gambler’s face and expect us to find something new. I, at least, never did.
As a result, the first 90 minutes of “Mississippi Grind” feel like a pastiche of other gambling movies — sometimes literally, as when Mendelsohn and Reynolds quote snippets of dialogue from “The Hustler” (“Some people are just born to lose”). They run through card rooms with the confidence of Steve McQueen in “The Cincinnati Kid.” And they enact the classic gambling-movie conflict, in which the chatty confidence of youth smacks up against the weariness of degeneracy masked in something that’s supposed to look like wisdom but never does.
There are many spots where “Mississippi Grind” goes astray (the film begins with an image of a rainbow, a metaphor that is humped along throughout the movie, complete with its metaphoric pot of gold), but one of them felt particularly instructive, not so much in terms of good or bad filmmaking, but more in terms of how the gambling genre works. At the film’s outset, Boden and Fleck present Mendelsohn and Reynolds as men without pasts. As the trip goes on, however, we learn more about both men: Gerry has an estranged wife and daughter; Curtis suffered abuse at the hands of his grandfather as a child.
You can hardly begrudge a filmmaker for trying to fill in characters, but none of this information does much to deepen our connection with them; the personal details feel tacked on, manipulative. This is because the usual emotional tricks a screenwriter employs to generate sympathy don’t really work in a gambling film. In real gambling, there is no a clear line between trauma and the casino. Conversations never go beyond an imminent football game or some bad beat you took. Metaphors exist only as superstitions. It doesn’t matter if you win big or lose big, because you’ll be back the next day to even out the variance.
The pathos in a good gambling film rises out of this unmoored infinity. Our sympathy comes from knowing not what makes a character a problem gambler, but from knowing that there is no real resolution for him. Personal details muck that up. All we know about Fast Eddie Felson is that he comes from Oakland and that he has been on the road for a while. Altman doesn’t even allow Gould and Segal their friendship in “California Split;” they might share excited days at the track and at the bar, but when Segal finally needs help, Gould is off at a dog track in Mexico. And when Segal finally gets over in Reno, he refuses to let Gould watch him play. Each film ends with the hero walking out of a room without telling anyone where he is going.
This exact scene — the gambler’s departure — concludes most notable gambling movies, including “Mississippi Grind.” In nearly all of them, he walks out alone. But here, “Mississippi Grind” makes a confounding departure from form, one that dooms the entire film. After Gerry makes his exit, instead of casting him off into the unknown, Boden and Fleck give us one last scene in which Gerry puts a photo of his estranged daughter up on the sun visor of his beat-up Subaru. The credits roll. Gerry, we presume, has been changed.
I have spent my fair share of time in poker rooms and casinos listening to all kinds of lies about money, women and catastrophe, but I have never met anyone audacious enough to try to sell the fantasy of a gambler who runs up half a million dollars and walks away to start a life of filial responsibility. In gambling, resolution — whatever that means — lies somewhere else. The great films understand that happiness is not the end of the story, but rather something you find fleetingly in those dirty, compromised spaces where you meet someone with the same problems, and they make you forget, at least for a little while, that they are problems at all. That moment of hope against the odds, the temporary bonding of two doomed people — that is the gambling movie’s appeal. I still haven’t figured out if it is a metaphor for anything more.
<footer class="story-footer story-content" style="margin-left: 135px; width: 510px; margin-top: 24px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: nyt-cheltenham, georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 16px;">Jay Caspian Kang is a contributing writer for the magazine and the author of the novel “The Dead Do Not Improve.”
</footer>
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/05/magazine/the-perfect-predictability-of-gambling-movies.html
Last winter, I found myself in card clubs again. Maybe every 10th or 11th day, nothing too disturbing. I haven’t been a good card player for years; at some point, you simply accept that you’re not playing to win, at least not to win consistently. This might sound like a problem, but when you’re losing only what you can afford to lose, the guilt can be rationalized away. You could have paid for a nice dinner and a nice bottle (or two) of wine with the money you lost tonight, but that dinner would have lasted only two hours at most, and you played cards for six hours – and so forth.
On one of these nights, I met a 23-year-old kid who grew up in my hometown. He told me that he had dropped out of college after his freshman year to have a go at professional poker. He was doing pretty well, all things considered — he made enough money to pay rent, buy clothes and attend music festivals. What else does a 23-year-old need in New York City?
This kid beat me in a hand for about $180 that night, but we formed a friendship. I would text him, and he would invariably be playing somewhere in the city, and I would head down, dump a few chips and talk to him about hand strategy, game selection, poker theory — all the things I was interested in when I was a younger, more optimistic card player. We took a few road trips to Atlantic City, where we were comped rooms thanks to the off-season and urban decay. He would almost always win, and although I wasn’t winning or losing any more than usual, I felt, for the first time in years, the insane yet pleasant hope that I might start winning. The kid made it seem possible.
In July, he went to Las Vegas to play in the World Series of Poker. I staked part of his buy-in to one of the tournaments, and he sent me updates throughout his run to a respectable finish in the money. Then, for the next five days, I didn’t hear from him at all. Anyone who has watched a gambling movie knows what happened to the kid in Vegas and can guess what kept happening once he got back to New York.
Every gambling story ends the same way. This, oddly enough, is what makes it the perfect narrative for movies. The American epic requires an easy binary, preferably one that connotes complexity without actually being complex. All of gambling’s conflicts — the swings between debt and no debt, the blunt debauchery and the blunter piety — can be clearly broadcast across Paul Newman’s beautiful face. The director of a gambling film really needs only an actor who suffers well and the courage to clear everything else off the table.
Plot lines within the genre are simple by necessity. There is really only one: the gambler falls into debt; the gambler goes after one big score to get even; the gambler either does or does not get even. The variations on that story depend, mostly, on whether the filmmaker sees gambling as a catastrophic vice or a charming hustle.
The catastrophe variant is exemplified by Robert Altman’s “California Split,” a relentlessly bleak film that follows Elliott Gould and George Segal through one big degenerate swing. Segal meets Gould while playing cards in Southern California. Segal begins to believe Gould is his good-luck charm. Segal falls into debt. Segal and Gould head to Reno to try to get even. Altman offers his protagonists no quarter. The entire film, shot in his capacious, chatty style, is saddled with an unexpected moral alarmism — you can almost hear the director’s bitter exhalations in the background.
Altman is so focused on squalor and hopelessness — the mute dealers, the lounge singer with the smoke-ravaged voice, the janitor who, while sweeping the casino floor, pumps quarters into a slot machine — that he misses the small moments of humanity among degenerates. From my own years in those same card rooms in Los Angeles, I can report that things might be terrible, but they are not quite so theatrically terrible. Most of the time passed in boredom and desperation is muted; it hangs and sags. In Altman’s vision, sadness crackles at the edges of every shot.
The modern poker classic “Rounders” has a beautiful, suffering face (this time provided by Edward Norton, playing a card hustler recently released from prison), but the film’s director and writers don’t let him languish quite so long. Norton and Matt Damon — playing Norton’s childhood friend — share some laughs, go into debt and need a dramatic upswing to make them whole again. But everything in “Rounders” sparkles a bit too brightly. The poker rooms, even the grim ones, are shot in dramatic light, the regular gamblers pay their children’s private-school bills, the dealers are Famke Janssen, Damon’s hero is a promising law student at Columbia.
Rather than conclude with a declaration of gambling’s perpetual hopelessness, “Rounders” ends with a bright-eyed, determined Damon on his way to Las Vegas to play in the World Series of Poker. The moral of “California Split,” memorably snarled by Elliott Gould in the film’s final scene, is: ”None of it meant anything, did it?” “Rounders,” by contrast, ends with Damon’s saying: “First prize at the World Series of Poker is a million bucks. Does it have my name on it? I don’t know. … But I’m gonna find out.” We aren’t supposed to feel inspired, exactly, but we are at least expected to wish him luck.
“The Hustler,” the landmark 1961 pool hall film, sidles in somewhere between “California Split” and “Rounders.” Fast Eddie Felson is the most charming of the bunch (owing, in no small part, to Paul Newman’s good looks, which are on full display here), but he also withholds the most. His secrets stay secret. When he finally gets over in the film’s last scene, he looks at his vanquished rival, Minnesota Fats, and says, “Fat man, you play a beautiful game of pool.” Felson’s hustling days might be over, but he still appreciates the game. There is a glimmer of dignity there.
The degenerate who falls deeper into degeneracy; the triumphant cardsharp who finally beats the house; the hustler who wants to play for the love of the game over the love of the gamble. Of these three, only the degenerate reflects reality. The cardsharp and the reformed hustler are the degenerate’s pornography. All three are “real,” insofar as the pornography is what keeps the degenerate going. He does not exist if not for this glimmer of false hope.
“Mississippi Grind,” the latest entry in the litany of American gambling movies, borrows from all three of these archetypes. The film follows a down-and-out gambler named Gerry (Ben Mendelsohn) and his new friend, Curtis (Ryan Reynolds), as they take a gambling trip down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. The setup is familiar — Gerry owes money to everyone around town, so when Curtis shows up and inspires a short-lived change of luck, Gerry corrals his new friend and pulls up stakes in search of a run of hot cards.
Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, the writers and directors of “Mississippi Grind,” clearly know their genre inside out. Mendelsohn might not have a beautiful face, but no one suffers quite as haggardly or as creepily as he does. The film is a collection of references and homages that hover, satellite-like, around whatever torment happens to be passing across Mendelsohn’s face. But like a basketball team that signs a huge star without building a team around him, Boden and Fleck seem far too content to coast on the idea of Mendelsohn-as-degenerate, without giving him a fully developed film to inhabit. It feels as if Boden and Fleck present us with rote gambling scenes and a rote gambler’s face and expect us to find something new. I, at least, never did.
As a result, the first 90 minutes of “Mississippi Grind” feel like a pastiche of other gambling movies — sometimes literally, as when Mendelsohn and Reynolds quote snippets of dialogue from “The Hustler” (“Some people are just born to lose”). They run through card rooms with the confidence of Steve McQueen in “The Cincinnati Kid.” And they enact the classic gambling-movie conflict, in which the chatty confidence of youth smacks up against the weariness of degeneracy masked in something that’s supposed to look like wisdom but never does.
There are many spots where “Mississippi Grind” goes astray (the film begins with an image of a rainbow, a metaphor that is humped along throughout the movie, complete with its metaphoric pot of gold), but one of them felt particularly instructive, not so much in terms of good or bad filmmaking, but more in terms of how the gambling genre works. At the film’s outset, Boden and Fleck present Mendelsohn and Reynolds as men without pasts. As the trip goes on, however, we learn more about both men: Gerry has an estranged wife and daughter; Curtis suffered abuse at the hands of his grandfather as a child.
You can hardly begrudge a filmmaker for trying to fill in characters, but none of this information does much to deepen our connection with them; the personal details feel tacked on, manipulative. This is because the usual emotional tricks a screenwriter employs to generate sympathy don’t really work in a gambling film. In real gambling, there is no a clear line between trauma and the casino. Conversations never go beyond an imminent football game or some bad beat you took. Metaphors exist only as superstitions. It doesn’t matter if you win big or lose big, because you’ll be back the next day to even out the variance.
The pathos in a good gambling film rises out of this unmoored infinity. Our sympathy comes from knowing not what makes a character a problem gambler, but from knowing that there is no real resolution for him. Personal details muck that up. All we know about Fast Eddie Felson is that he comes from Oakland and that he has been on the road for a while. Altman doesn’t even allow Gould and Segal their friendship in “California Split;” they might share excited days at the track and at the bar, but when Segal finally needs help, Gould is off at a dog track in Mexico. And when Segal finally gets over in Reno, he refuses to let Gould watch him play. Each film ends with the hero walking out of a room without telling anyone where he is going.
This exact scene — the gambler’s departure — concludes most notable gambling movies, including “Mississippi Grind.” In nearly all of them, he walks out alone. But here, “Mississippi Grind” makes a confounding departure from form, one that dooms the entire film. After Gerry makes his exit, instead of casting him off into the unknown, Boden and Fleck give us one last scene in which Gerry puts a photo of his estranged daughter up on the sun visor of his beat-up Subaru. The credits roll. Gerry, we presume, has been changed.
I have spent my fair share of time in poker rooms and casinos listening to all kinds of lies about money, women and catastrophe, but I have never met anyone audacious enough to try to sell the fantasy of a gambler who runs up half a million dollars and walks away to start a life of filial responsibility. In gambling, resolution — whatever that means — lies somewhere else. The great films understand that happiness is not the end of the story, but rather something you find fleetingly in those dirty, compromised spaces where you meet someone with the same problems, and they make you forget, at least for a little while, that they are problems at all. That moment of hope against the odds, the temporary bonding of two doomed people — that is the gambling movie’s appeal. I still haven’t figured out if it is a metaphor for anything more.
<footer class="story-footer story-content" style="margin-left: 135px; width: 510px; margin-top: 24px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: nyt-cheltenham, georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 16px;">Jay Caspian Kang is a contributing writer for the magazine and the author of the novel “The Dead Do Not Improve.”
</footer>
