Odds and Ends

Two phenomena are occurring simultaneously at this moment in American pop culture: a demand on the nation’s editorial pages and radio call-in shows for increased accountability, and a fascination with casino culture that has seeped into the national consciousness like a highball spilling on leopard skin. On the surface, the devil-may-care accessories of goodfella chic—cigars, lounge music, garish suits, Milton magazine—would appear to have little in common with the moralists’ cry for greater personal responsibility. But isn’t gambling the harshest teacher around for facing up to your choices? Trust an idiot who once blew his last $50 on three-card monte—the minute the bet’s made and the cards turn, buddy, you’re accountable.

For a country on a personal-responsibility kick, an obsession with the paraphernalia of the ultimate existential sport is a logical step. For all its moral and ethical sinkholes, gambling is a world where actions have definite and immediate consequences. There are rules, contracts, and codes of conduct, and either you live by them or you accept the price—in cash or in flesh. Therein lies the appeal of movies about gambling, or all movies, for that matter: a fascination with the lives we don’t lead, the risks we would never dare. Watching a gambling movie is getting to lose with someone else’s money.

Hard Eight is a gripping low-key mood piece about making tough choices and living with them; in its lowlife allure and fatalistic cool, it’s up there with Pulp Fiction and Jean-Pierre Melville’s super 1955 noir drama Bob le Flambeur. The superb character actor Philip Baker Hall plays Sydney, an aging professional gambler who encounters a crumpled sack of a kid outside a diner. Crisply dressed, confident, and seemingly compassionate, Sydney offers the flat-broke kid, John (John C. Reilly), some company and then a deal: He’ll give the greenhorn a modest stake at a Reno casino and instruct him on how to parlay that into a free hotel room.

Is Syd just a good guy with pure motives? Yes—and no. Syd’s definitely carrying some baggage, and not just the leathery pouches beneath his endlessly searching eyes. This ever-cautious control freak has at least one serious weakness: a habit of building enough cash to drop a bundle on the hard eight—the all-but-impossible double fours, a bitch-slapping waiting to happen. John, who worships him, doesn’t know anything about his past; neither does Clementine (Gwyneth Paltrow), the dim hooker whom John loves and Syd protects. But somebody else does.

The first-time writer-director, Paul Thomas Anderson, has made Hard Eight with such attention to detail that it’s practically a virtual-reality exercise in bettor anxiety—not the exhilarating unease that high rollers feel, but the grind of having to eke out just enough to make the next day’s stake. Photographed by Robert Elswit in a haze of stale smoke and too-bright light, the movie inches warily through game rooms, bars, and cheap diners, expecting trouble. But violence only flares up twice on camera, and always with cold, swift economy—a quality that Anderson’s direction sometimes shares.

The director favors long, unshowy takes that turn viewers into hidden accomplices, and he’s obviously spent a lot of time observing this milieu. Contemporary audiences with an underbelly-of-society jones want a lot more insider information than, say, people who paid to see The Lemon Drop Kid five decades ago. Anderson indulges them. His details look and sound authentic, down to a triptych of shots that capture a small-time gambler’s entire life in a single meal: cold coffee, half-eaten pie, and stubbed-out cigarettes.

The big trend these days is to flesh out crime-dramas with lots of ostentatious character roles, the better to fill them with big-name cameos. Bucking the fashion, Hard Eight sticks to its three main characters like dried sweat—especially the compulsively watchable Hall, whose brusque nobility and nonstop calculation are a riveting combination. As a result, the performances and relationships are unusually complex. By the time Samuel L. Jackson turns up as a security guard whose smooth talk masks some rough intentions, the characters are so interesting that we relish a confrontation. When it comes—a long, mesmerizing duel of wits between a man who senses an easy score and a man who’s faced a lifetime of hard choices—it’s a knockout.

The movie has one minor flaw. Although the secret from Syd’s past makes sense, both in terms of character motivation and Hall’s haunted performance, it’s the script’s only note of melodramatic contrivance. Elsewhere, as a writer, Anderson displays a born storyteller’s gift for knowing when to introduce new twists and characters, and his spiky, insinuating dialogue conveys a lot through what his characters don’t, or won’t, say. (His upcoming Boogie Nights, a three-hour epic about the rise of the 1970s porn industry, ought to really be something.) There are basically two kinds of gambling flicks: movies about the thrill of winning big, and movies about self-destructive loners who crave a punishing smack upside the head from fate. As movies about losers go, Hard Eight is a real winner.—Jim Ridley