Know When to Fold 'Em: THE GAMBLER

The Gambler stars Mark Wahlberg as a gambling addict. He doesn’t know when to hold ‘em or fold ‘em. He’s chasing that next payout, sinking more and more money into his habit, unable or unwilling to quit. The movie starts in an underground casino where he’s stuck to the blackjack table. At one point he’s up tens of thousands, but quickly sinks back in the red. He now owes six-figures in debt to some shady characters, some of them lurking about this very establishment. He’s given an ultimatum: pay up in 7 days or he’ll risk, at best, certain death. This is the start of an addiction drama and character study crossed with a glum thriller about a man who’s dug himself a mighty deep hole and can’t help but keep digging, hoping against hope he’ll find a way out.

In this reworking of Karel Reisz’s James Caan-starring 1974 film of the same name, screenwriter William Monahan gives us a good understanding of the man’s life. He’s an English professor who resents his nonstarter novelist career. He bitterly tells a class his mantra: “If you’re not a genius, don’t even bother.” He comes from a wealthy family, but his recently deceased grandfather (George Kennedy) left him nothing in the will and his socialite mother (Jessica Lange) has cut him off. He’s a man born into privilege who has just about exhausted its supply. He’s smart, published, has a good job and makes decent money. He just so happens to be in over his head, owing more than he could possibly scrape together in a week. The movie tightens the grip of this scenario, counting down the days, watching as every lucky break leads him to relapse, gambling away much needed cash. Dangers creep closer.

This is one of Wahlberg’s best performances. He’s playing a tired, frustrated, unhappy person, a man of talent and intelligence who has long since given in to his worst habits and tendencies. Wahlberg is one of those actors easy to miscast because, though he has plenty of skill, it’s in a narrow range. He’s perfect with goofy charm or eager determination in his great roles – Boogie Nights, Three Kings, The Other Guys, Pain & Gain – but easily goes wrong in a part that doesn’t ask for those attributes. Here he plays depression and addiction with stillness and hollowed out blank stares. Wahlberg constantly appears exhausted, a tad disheveled, a little out of breath. Addiction has taken its toll. Bad decisions beget bad decisions. He’s finally backed himself into a corner. He wears the burden of depression and anxiety heavily, compensating with sarcasm masked as truth telling and moping. It’s a glossy star vehicle with a deliberate pace, and his weary presence owns it, but for the moments he turns over to the supporting cast.

We meet his black market creditors, a diverse but menacing bunch played by a fine collection of character actors. There’s a grandfatherly soft-spoken Korean (Alvin Ing), a chummy but deadly gangster (Michael K. Williams), and a scary deep-pockets moneyman (John Goodman as a bald, glowering mountain of intimidation). In between nervous one-on-one confrontations with the dark side of his life, he’s back in his respectable teaching career. We see him meet with students both troubled (Anthony Kelley) and promising (Brie Larson, making the most of the film’s worst aspect which makes her a clichéd object, pure feminine ideal symbolizing a light in the darkness). But mostly his students are bored as he prattles on, lecturing on literature as his troubles lurk in the back of his mind. This lurking infects the filmmaking, every catchy rock song on the soundtrack abruptly cut off by the next development.

A slick, steady, confident film, The Gambler is the third feature from Rupert Wyatt. His previous directorial effort resurrected the Planet of the Apes franchise (with Rise of the…). He’s used the clout earned there to make a muscular studio drama, a lean, tough, modest little self-contained character-driven thriller built out of crackling conversations and sharp, writerly dialogue. The screenplay is wordy and tense. No one talks like this, but isn’t that one of the pleasures of the movies? Characters here are always ready to hold forth on life philosophies and armchair psychiatric opinions of each other. Scenes of talky negotiation and high-stakes gamesmanship create a picture of a man who’s smart enough to know better, is well aware of that flaw, and gambles on his ability to get out of trouble anyway. It’s involving to watch the plot develop, humming along its downbeat groove until the last bets are made and the results are in.

Don't You Remember You Told Me You Loved Me: THE VOW

In most Hollywood romances, the ending is obvious: the two biggest stars in the film are going to fall in love. That’s the very nature of the genre. What makes The Vow a somewhat interesting genre exercise is how it starts with the stars in love and takes it all away from them. At the beginning of the film, we meet the central couple already married. They’re just driving away from a movie theater (Chicago’s Music Box Theater, no less) on a frosty night when they’re rear-ended by a truck that just can’t stop fast enough in the freshly fallen snow. This is when we get the Meet Cute, in flashback, followed by a getting-to-know-you montage that starts with their first date, follows them through many more, and then ends in their marriage.

Back in the present, the wife wakes up from her coma without her memories of the last five years. She looks uncomprehendingly at her anxious husband. She thinks he’s her doctor. She looks down at her ring finger and is shocked. Who is this man? The structure of these opening scenes flips the script. We already know the two of them are in love, are married. The central question is whether or not she’ll remember those feelings. The husband’s determined to re-woo his wife, but she just wants to figure out what to do in this life she doesn’t remember creating for herself.

Channing Tatum and Rachel McAdams play the husband and wife and they relate to each other pre- and post-accident in convincing ways. They’re a believable couple, intimate and comfortable. Later, he can’t help but take her memory loss a little personally. McAdams plays it subtly differently after the accident, posture a little straighter, voice a little looser. She feels like a woman who has fallen back in time while everyone else moved forward. She sees the pain on her husband’s face but she can’t recognize him as her husband.

What she does see, what’s comfortable to her, is her parents (Sam Neill and Jessica Lange), her neighborhood, her old friends, her old life, even her old boyfriend (Scott Speedman). We learn that she was in law school and decided she wanted to change course. She had a falling out with her parents and moved into the city where she studied to become an artist. She hasn’t seen her parents in years. Her husband never met them. Now, they’re all she knows. She woke up a law student again, surprised not only by her marriage but by her career as well.

Director Michael Sucsy presents all of this with a kind of glossy Hallmark-card heartbreak that works pretty well. There’s a surprisingly effective core of convincing emotion here. McAdams delivers strong work and I must admit that Tatum’s limited range is starting to charm me from time to time. In fact, if the film had honed in on its lead performances and really felt them instead of just presenting them, it would really have been something. As it is, I wish someone could have gotten his or her hands on the script by Abby Kohn (of Valentine’s Day) and Jason Katims (of Friday Night Lights) and just tightened it up, sharpened the focus, and cleaned away all the clutter.

The supporting cast members aren’t allowed to pop out in any notable way and there are easily a half-dozen characters standing around. Neill and Lange do good work with thin roles as the stuffy, rich parents who swoop in and try to use the amnesia to help mend their relationship with their not-exactly-starving-artist daughter. (She forgot whatever it was that came between them, so why not? Right?) But the central husband and wife each have a gaggle of friends and colleagues that float around as convenient scene partners to bounce emotions and plot points off of without ever coming into clear focus as actual characters. There’s little sense of how these people actually relate with each other, let alone with the plot and emotions of the film. Consequentially, the film grows aimless and overlong, wobbling through a concept that once seemed so promising. By the end, I felt my patience running thin.

At one point, Lange’s character tells her daughter that she chooses to forgive, happy for all the things done right instead of focusing on the things done wrong. That’s how I’d like to approach this film. I appreciate all involved for sneaking something slightly raw (I said slightly) and more complicated (again, slightly) than you’d expect from a slick Hollywood romance. But as I sat there, I kept imagining a movie that really gave in to the kind of intricate emotional territory the concept suggests, a slick psychological drama of a romance that really dug into the couple’s relationship instead of presenting it in moments of greeting-card uplift. I think the actors are ready to go there, but the material doesn’t let them. But that they even get part of the way there is something of some small interest.