Mark Reviews Movies: THE CARD COUNTER

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 9, 2021

Whether or not The Card Counter possesses a solid sense of narrative cohesion, writer/director Paul Schrader's film is a methodical character study, simmering in a stew of palpable but barely spoken anger and constant regret. Our protagonist, a professional but under-the-radar gambler, more or less makes the filmmaker's purpose clear, while describing the game of poker and the skills required to succeed at it. It's all about reading and knowing one's opponent, and a great poker player can see through the layers—the sunglasses, the hats, the hooded sweatshirts—and look directly into a person's soul.

That's Schrader's intention here: to see what makes William Tell (Oscar Isaac), the enigmatic focal point of this story, tick. There are layers to this man, even though he doesn't play poker with anything hiding or obscuring his face. The name, obviously, is an alias, hiding a past that only he can know, if only because the reality of it is too terrible for anyone else to learn, without the fact of it indelibly changing the way anyone would look at him.

We know he served time—about 10 years, with a trial and an actual post-conviction sentence—in prison. There, he learned a few things. He learned how to count cards, for sure, giving him an edge at blackjack tables in casinos, as he travels across the country making modest winnings to keep the casinos from booting him.

He also discovered the benefit of a regular routine, a daily regiment, and series of tasks. One detail about Will's life is especially haunting. Whenever he arrives in the room of whatever inexpensive motel where he's staying (He refuses to take a room at any casino, lest anyone look into his life), Will unpacks a series of sheets from his suitcase, covers all of the furniture, and takes the added time to tie up any loose cloth hanging from the sheets.

The process strips the room of any color, any personality, and any sense of normalcy. Beneath that, there's a kind of implicit threat, as if this is a room waiting for some kind of crime to occur at any moment—and some sort of cover-up to immediately follow it.

What is Will hiding—not only from the world, but also, in a way, from himself? That's the central question of Schrader's film, and it constantly evolves as more and more about the character is revealed.

The loose plot follows Will on his cross-country trips to assorted casinos. It's an entirely anonymous enterprise: The cities don't matter, and the actual casinos only matter in that Will knows the indigenous origin of some of their names. At night, writing in notebooks within those bare motel rooms, Will explains the mechanics and math of card counting, while also detailing how prison made him into the man of austere living, regular habit, and low risk that he is today. It's a reform of some sort, perhaps, although the routine and constant movement helps to keep something within him at bay, too.

Three other characters fit in some form of prominence in Will's story. The first is La Linda (Tiffany Haddish), who knows Will from playing poker with him a few times on his low-key tour. She wants to make him part of her "stable" of players, financially backed by people with a lot of money and participating in official tournaments.

He doesn't want any of that—the spotlight and the potential debt—until he meets a young man named Cirk (Tye Sheridan), pronounced "Kirk." They meet at a talk by the third figure, an independent security consultant named Gordo (Willem Dafoe).

Both Will and Cirk's father knew Gordo, back in the days when they were in the military and the government established a wide ring of "enhanced interrogation" practices for suspected terrorists (A stunning, one-take flashback sequence takes us through the halls of Abu Ghraib, with a camera lens peeling away the image, as more and more visions of torture are uncovered). Will ended up in prison, and Cirk was left without a father. If Will agrees to play for La Linda, he might be able to make enough money to help Cirk and atone for some of his sins. The "Kid," as Will starts calling him, has other, darker plans for making things right.

Part of Schrader's game here is the mystery of Will, what he's capable of doing and willing to do, and what his actual goals are. Another part of it, though, is establishing the same sense of routine that keeps Will going. He plays cards, has a drink at the bar, and talks to his new sort-of friends and other acquaintances about anything but the events that define him. We watch all of this, with a growing knowledge of Will's history and apparent motives, and the effect, highlighted by the hypnotizing stillness of Isaac's stone-faced performance, is an unnerving combination of monotony and menace.

Some of this feels inconsistent (The combination of Will's back story and the world of gambling never quite gels thematically) or unconvincing (A romance between Will and La Linda is undermined by a lot of shoptalk and its consummation arriving as a punch line), but The Card Counter is as much about the smaller details as the more significant ones. Through those, we come to understand the complexity and paradox of the eponymous character, while Schrader creates a mood that lulls us into complacency, as well as some optimism, before revealing who Will actually can be.

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