Nihilism pairs naturally with playing cards semi-professionally. Those hitting the poker circuit know this. The most improbable river (the fifth card in a game of Texas Hold ‘em) can render the best hand and best player a loser in the wings, drawing dead. They just don’t know it yet. It seems that odds are meaningless against the tides of fate. Cold, calculating, and reductive, the best poker players are those who remove the emotional element entirely, stoic ice statues playing odds, preying on the faintest whiff of weakness. The Card Counter, the newest film from auteur Paul Schrader (First Reformed) is a nihilistic meditation on the impossibility of redemption, as a broken military man turned gifted gambler wrestles with his demons around a card table.
Oscar Isaac is that man, a mysterious drifter of few words who goes by the name William Tell, taking on the misnomer of the famed marksman and wearing it like an impenetrable cloak. Isaac’s “Tell” is equally calculating and precise, using his nearly nine years spent incarcerated in Leavenworth to study the surreptitious art of card counting and wielding it against casinos around the country. His trick? To know his limits; to win small. Tell claims that management doesn’t care when the little guy scores, even if they are counting cards. Only big money wins draw any attention.
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Traveling from Atlantic City to Las Vegas to the Racisos of Delaware, Tell lives a weary life of repetition, wrapping up the motel rooms where he sleeps in canvas as if he were a student of Dexter Morgan angling for the next kill. A physical representation of the barrier he’s placed between himself and anything resembling a real life, he’s disconnected from all. Cloth and twine circle the lampshades, dulling the aura of his private spaces, keeping the light out. Tell is a ghost made of flesh.
When the militant gambler crosses paths with an equally lost young man by the name of Cirk (Tye Sheridan), he sees a glimmer of his former self and hopes to win some kind of redemption by taking the kid under his wing and setting him on the right path. Entering into an agreement with gregarious stable lead and potential love interest La Linda (Tiffany Haddish) with the hopes of entering the semi-pro WSOP circuit to build a nest egg substantial enough to right Cirk’s ship, Tell escapes his monotonous routine.
Angling for a way to atone for the sins accrued during his years spent administering “enhanced interrogation techniques” at the infamous Abu Ghraib black site, we see the depths of how deeply damaged this character is, whether that be in his tired-eyed emotional detachment from seemingly everything and everyone in his orbit or during flashbacks as he eggs fellow prisoners into beating him within an inch of his life.
Forgiveness is a mercy that The Card Counter rarely affords and the script – also from Schrader – explores the notion of a soul assumed to be irredeemable. Isaac reflects the cold, nihilistic qualities of the character (and film writ large) in chilling, tragic manner. A master of cold intensity, Isaac broods with the best of them. Facing down Willem Dafoe as colonel John Gordon, a military contractor Tell describes as “all nails”, we come to conclusions that some stains have been set too deep to scrub.
Fitting squarely within his oeuvre, The Card Counter sees Schrader telling an almost aggressively transgressive tragedy. This is not a happy tale, something the somber soundtrack from Black Rebel Motorcycle Club’s Robert Levon Been reminds us of whenever it drips through the speakers, and we’re left expecting happy endings to elude these characters. Schrader’s movies are often hypnotic and meditative, deep dives into the psyche that explore issues of mortality, faith, and goodness, and that’s certainly the case here, though the filmmaker keeps the simmering pathos of the film always right beneath the surface. Sparingly, Schrader allows the aesthetics of this film to explode off the screen, like in a rare tender moment shared between Tell and La Linda in a neon sea of lights, launched into the stratosphere by Alexander Dynan’s hypnotic and psychedelic cinematography.
An overture to the regret and rage that flows through those who’ve crossed a line in the sand of their own moral compass, The Card Counter is a sobering, funereal character study. Though it never explodes into abject violence or pops off the screen in ways that audiences are traditionally accustomed to – many of its most pivotal plot turns taking place offscreen – Schrader’s dark stain of a film lingers in the soul regardless.
CONCLUSION: Oscar Isaac is a gambler of few words in this subdued, shady exploration of sin. Writer-director Paul Schrader continues to make challenging – borderline nihilistic – films that challenge our notion of tradition narrative arcs, his work squirreling its way into our conscience like few can.
B
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By: Matt Oakes
Started blogging about film in college when the university paper wouldn’t have him. Dislikes your consensus film Twitter favorites. Devotee of horror movies that make him die a little inside. Catches films at festivals when he can. Proud SFCS and OFCS member and Tomatometer-approved critic. Editor-in-chief of Silver Screen Riot.
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