The Card Counter (2021)
dir. Paul Schrader
Rated: R
image: ©2021 Focus Features
The late-career renaissance that Paul Schrader started with his 2018 film First Reformed continues with his new picture, The Card Counter. The two movies have quite a bit in common; they work well as companion pieces. Both feature sparse storytelling techniques. While First Reformed is a purer example of slow cinema, The Card Counter certainly fits the transcendental filmmaking mold.
Schrader has a decades-long career obsession with examining psychologically broken protagonists seeking redemption and absolution. Both First Reformed and The Card Counter tackle systemic failures of society as a way into their main characters’ psyches. In First Reformed, it was climate change. In The Card Counter, it’s the United States government and military’s unconscionable orchestration of torture in the so-called “war on terror” of the Bush years.
At the beginning of the film, we meet William Tell as he describes to us in voiceover his mastery of the skill of counting cards. It’s most useful for him in the game of black jack, but he can also turn it to his advantage in poker. But The Card Counter is about gambling and poker about as much as The Social Network is about the ubiquitous social media platform Facebook. Both subjects only serve as a way into the troubled psychological headspace of the movies’ protagonists.
William honed his talent while serving a ten-year sentence in a military prison. He was one of the soldiers photographed participating in torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Haunted by what he’s done and seen, William wanders across the country from casino to casino, existing more than living. While in Atlantic City, he finds himself in the middle of a private security and law enforcement convention. He walks into a conference room where a man named Major John Gordo is giving a lecture on new facial recognition software that his company has developed.
Another attendee of the lecture recognizes William and stops him when he gets up to leave the room. The young man is named Cirk – pronounced like Kirk – and the two agree to meet for drinks after Cirk gives William a slip of paper with his contact information. Cirk tells William he recognizes him not as William Tell, but as Pfc William Tillich, from news coverage of the Abu Ghraib scandal.
Cirk’s father also served at Abu Ghraib. He came back from Iraq a broken man, beating both Cirk and his mother. When his mother abandoned him, Cirk became the sole focus of his father’s abuse, until he took his own life. Major John Gordo is the private contractor who trained Cirk’s father – as well as, we learn, William – in the dark art of torture, but because of his connections and the fact that he wasn’t within the military chain of command, he escaped any consequences from his time in Iraq. Cirk has a plan to make Gordo pay, and he wants to know if William is interested in helping.
Through this harrowing piece of art, Schrader is forcing us to reckon with the failure of accountability for the architects of the torture program implemented in the early 2000s, as a barbaric response to the 9/11 attacks. The Bush administration, and especially the now-deceased former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, laid the crimes against humanity committed at Abu Ghraib at the feet of “a few bad apples.” But as Cirk makes clear in The Card Counter, “The apples weren’t bad. The whole barrel they came from was bad.”
Schrader brings this disgusting and now-mostly-forgotten (by Americans, anyway) chapter in US history to visceral and disturbing life in The Card Counter. A film like 2019’s The Report – which details a staffer for Senator Dianne Feinstein leading the investigation which uncovered much of the illegal torture program – includes some harrowing recreations of what happened at military bases and CIA black sites during Bush and Rumsfeld’s reigns. They are nothing compared to the stomach-churning flashback sequences Schrader stages here.
His cinematographer, Alexander Dynan, uses a camera lens to create an effect I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. Dynan’s previous work includes making First Reformed as stunningly beautiful as the torture scenes in The Card Counter are sickening.
In these sequences, in which the camera roams around Abu Ghraib prison as the soldiers visit all manner of dehumanizing acts upon their prisoners, both sides of the frame bow out and become extremely distorted, almost like a fish-eye lens. When the camera tracks backwards, the distorted objects at the edges of the frame come rushing into the center, instead of moving away from the center, as they do when the camera is moving forward.
Through William’s nightmares, we see beatings and torture, like stress positions and dogs used to terrorize. We see humiliation, like prisoners smeared with human feces or being forced to remain naked in front of guards and other prisoners. These moments are hauntingly faithful recreations of the disgusting pictures that CBS News published in 2004, when they broke the story.
William wants no part of Cirk’s plan, and he resolves to help the troubled 20-something pay off his student loan debt with poker winnings, as well as reunite him with his mother. William knows he can’t save himself – the irredeemable protagonist is a running theme in most of Schrader’s work – so he throws his energy into saving Cirk before it’s too late. In order to play for the kind of money he will need to help Cirk, William joins a stable of poker players managed by La Linda, an acquaintance he’s made on the casino circuit. La Linda finds and maintains relationships with the players for a group of big money investors, who bankroll the players for a percentage of their winnings.
The biggest fault of Shrader’s First Reformed is his use of that movie’s only prominent female character as nothing more than a motivation for the male characters. He follows the same path in The Card Counter. La Linda serves as a bauble for William to latch onto; she represents the promise of a better life if William can overcome his demons and save Cirk from his.
That’s not to say that the chemistry between the two leads isn’t compelling. Tiffany Haddish turns in a fine dramatic performance as La Linda. Early praise for The Card Counter has touted the performance of Oscar Isaac as William. I wasn’t as taken by his efforts here as I usually am. Isaac is one of the most charismatic performers working in movies right now, but his William – undoubtedly at the request of Schrader – is drained of all color. Isaac’s choices as William are certainly of a piece with the rest of the movie, but the character’s calculated, stoic personality eliminates the magnetism usually present in the actor’s work.
The emotional heart of the movie, William and La Linda’s quiet nighttime walk through massive light displays in a garden, is transcendental and moving. Dynan’s cinematography makes the sequence a standout of the movie. The deeply beautiful colors are a visual representation of the beauty William has found in La Linda. If only she could exist in the movie as more than a love interest for Schrader’s hero.
Tye Sheridan turns in a haunting performance as Cirk, and Willem Dafoe is chilling – mostly in the flashback sequences – as Major Gordo.
Like the top officials and architects of the US torture program practiced in Iraq and elsewhere during the Bush years, the United States has never had to truly reckon with or answer for the human rights abuses it committed in those years. An immediate reminder of that is the revelation that only last month a US drone strike in Afghanistan killed 10 innocent people; seven of them were children. Like The Deer Hunter before it, The Card Counter exposes the festering trauma American power has inflicted on those it sends to war.
Paul Schrader has crafted another slow cinema masterpiece, even when factoring in its flaws.
Why it got 4 stars:
- I might be inviting the wrath of the internet, but in a world where MCU and DCEU entries suck up almost all the oxygen in the room, Paul Schrader is making movies for grownups. The Card Counter isn’t without its flaws, but it’s wrestling with some mature and haunting themes in aesthetically pleasing, and sometimes shocking, ways.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- I am of two minds about the film’s score. The sections of Robert Levon Been’s musical soundtrack that rely on barely-audible grunting and breathing are discomfiting and unsettling in a satisfying way. Later in the film, Been relies on a cheesy, overly-dramatic string arrangement that would feel at home in a Lifetime movie.
- Like the main character in First Reformed, Will is also fond of putting his innermost thoughts down in a journal. The technique verges on self-parody for Schrader, but I still bought it.
- There is also a character that makes the rounds of the same poker tournaments Will is playing. He’s an eastern European émigré who celebrates his adopted homeland with obnoxious glee. He’s always decked out in American flag apparel, and his cadre of hangers-on chant “USA! USA!” each time their leader wins a hand. This garish, idiotic portrait of US patriotism is undoubtedly Schrader’s attempt at irony, when juxtaposed against the horrendous crimes the country committed abroad. It’s as subtle as it sounds.
- I might not have been completely on board with Oscar Isaac’s performance here, but he gives one soliloquy as Will about the torture he witnessed and participated in that is stunning.
- It was exciting to see Martin Scorsese’s name listed as the executive producer. Schrader and Scorsese’s collaborations are legendary.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- Like First Reformed, I saw The Card Counter at The Texas Theatre. It was on their brand new second screen. There were three other people in attendance. It was about as perfect a setting as you could ask for for this movie.