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

Hard Eight runs through Thursday night at the Belcourt.

Routine gestures

Whether or not you’ll like the new comedy Father’s Day mostly depends on whether or not you like Billy Crystal and Robin Williams, and let me qualify what I mean by “like.” Not “Crystal was funny in City Slickers,” or “Williams did good work in The Birdcage.” No, by “like” I mean that you are amused by the very concept of Billy Crystal and Robin Williams—that they could go on Letterman and read poetry, and you’d set the VCR. Otherwise, unless you’re a cultist, there’s no real reason to watch Crystal and Williams do anything anymore. As with Paul McCartney, who has two pleasant but uninteresting songs on the Father’s Day soundtrack, the moment at which these two comic actors were important and innovative has long since passed. To spend money on new renditions of their old work is only to give the duo false hope.

In Crystal’s case, this irrelevance is especially sad. His career reached its peak with the populist, sweet City Slickers (a triumph that was as much Bruno Kirby’s as Crystal’s) and crashed scarcely a year later with the underrated Mr. Saturday Night, his big “auteur” move. Mr. Saturday Night failed because it took Crystal’s stock borscht-belt homage to its logical conclusion—to the picture of a pathetic old man unable to shed his brittle stage persona. No amount of schmaltz could hide the film’s bitter aftertaste, and nothing Crystal has done since has been able to escape the film’s cold shadow. That Saturday Night sadness still hangs around his eyes even when he’s shticking it out by rote on the Academy Awards.

And as for Williams, when was he last funny? Don’t say Mrs. Doubtfire, because there’s not a riff in that film that wasn’t more melodious in Good Morning, Vietnam. The myth that Williams is brilliant because he’s quick needs to be debunked. He was very clever once, and he can still call down lightning on occasion, but Williams’ comedy today is mostly based on confusion—he talks fast, does snippets of accents, tosses out names from the headlines, and people laugh out of habit. He hasn’t changed his comedic clothes in over a decade, and that famous flop sweat of his is starting to smell stale.

Father’s Day is a sturdy enough contraption for the graying twosome; it’s almost a throwback to their better days. Comedy veteran Ivan Reitman directs a script by comedy veterans Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, and the trio’s experience makes tight work out of a thin premise, based on a French farce by Francis Veber. Crystal and Williams play two middle-aged men who set out on a tour of punk clubs in search of a 16-year-old boy who may be the son of one of them. Leaving aside the sexist implications of the story (why doesn’t the boy’s mother, played by the capable Nastassja Kinski, conduct the search?), and the generational disparities between the 50ish stars and their slacker offspring, Father’s Day offers all the cute misunderstandings and touching reconciliations that you’d expect from a Ganz-Mandel screenplay.

But then the problem isn’t the vehicle; it’s the passengers. The set pieces that allow Crystal and Williams to do their thing collapse into lame, clichéd gags—Williams pretends to be German by mumbling the names of cars, Crystal picks on mimes, both complain about their prostates. The one laugh-out-loud funny moment in the film—a man trapped in a disgusting port-a-John as it rolls down a hill—involves neither of the film’s principals, and even that scene isn’t nearly as sharp as the more gonzo, digressive moments of Austin Powers, Grosse Pointe Blank, and Waiting for Guffman, this season’s truly funny comedies.

All of which is not to say that Father’s Day won’t be a huge hit. On the contrary, the audience I saw the film with got what they were looking for and had a rollicking good time. But living down to an audience’s expectations can only take you so far in comedy, and it’s only a matter of time before a new comedy by Williams or Crystal is shrugged off as though it were by Mel Brooks or Rodney Dangerfield.

This foreshadowing was evident as recently as last week, when Crystal and Williams did an inexplicable guest shot on Friends as two distraught foreign buddies in a coffee shop. The sharp young cast of the show—hardly comic geniuses but good at their jobs—looked at the two warhorses with a mixture of pity and disgust, as though resenting this hack intrusion into their hiply distinct comic universe. The faces of the Friends will be the faces of America if Crystal and Williams don’t shift out of autopilot, and soon. These boys need to get themselves an act.—Noel Murray