Writer director Paul Schrader deals a royal flush with THE CARD COUNTER, a one of a kind that deserves to play full houses.
Oscar Isaac plays William Tell, a former soldier and military convict now cruising the twilight world of casinos making a moderate living playing cards. He does just enough to get by professionally, playing cards by day and spending nights in anodyne motel rooms where he places white fabric over furniture and fixtures to camouflage the present. It’s a ritual laced with subtext.
Schrader’s screenplays significantly leave the space for thought, subtext and subconscious exploration, and you get that in spades with THE CARD COUNTER. Silences are golden, voice overs succinct, body language as telling as any of the crisp dialogue. It’s a cool cinematic sleight of hand.
It’s a beautifully tailored screenplay, peeling away the layers, surprising and shocking at revelation and detours. Like a poker game, there is bluff, busts, surprises and the stakes just get bigger.
Schrader’s concern has always been the loneliness and isolation of solitary men, from Travis Bickle’s escalating insanity in Taxi Driver to Reverend Toller’s quiet unraveling in First Reformed.
William Tell’s trajectory is no less searing and existential, but as his character develops and transforms over the course of THE CARD COUNTER, so does the viewer’s conflicted and mounting dread. We hope William’s existential despair can be redeemed when he finds a surrogate family in the form of his agent La Linda, a droll, measured turn by Tiffany Haddish and the teenager Cirk, nicely nuanced by Tye Sheridan, searching for meaning after his soldier father’s suicide.
Tiffany Haddish stars as La Linda in THE CARD COUNTER, a Focus Features release.
Credit: Courtesy of Focus Features / ©2021 Focus Features, LLC
Alexander Dynan has captured the monotonous yet colourful world of interstate casinos that are a step down from Las Vegas’ traditional vulgarity as well as the drab confines of William Tell’s prison stint in Leavenworth, and his harrowing experiences as a torturer at Abu Ghraib.
“You can’t do much about the world of interstate and coastal casinos, it’s just godawful,” says Schrader. “It’s like being trapped in Trump’s bathroom.” As for Abu Grahib, it has an Hieronymus Bosch hellish texture, a hall of mirrors horror vibe.
Another ace up the sleeve of THE CARD COUNTER is the song score by Robert Levon Breen, providing a parallel narrative to this surprising story.
In the crap-shoot of finding intelligent, adult fare at the movies, it’s worth betting on THE CARD COUNTER for a sure thing.
See the trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RvVT1cDiNc
Richard Cotter