"The Card Counter" and America's Faceless Places
A sort-of review of Paul Schrader's new film
A cool thing about having autonomy over my newsletter is I am free to not review movies. I enjoy straightforward film criticism, and I’ve worked as a critic, albeit in an unpaid capacity, but for the time being, that is not what I’m doing with Ruptured Screen. However, I’m certainly open to playing with the template, especially in these early posts where I’m trying to figure out what the hell might draw in new visitors.
On that note, I watched The Card Counter and liked it quite a bit! Rather than do a straightforward review, I’m attempting a hybrid of a review and a brief analysis of one aspect of the film that really resonated with me. If I like how this turns out and/or I receive positive feedback, I’ll return to this style of newsletter. If I’m feeling generous, I might even take requests to seek out certain new releases. If it doesn’t work as a concept, just do me a favor and let the absence of favorable responses speak for itself. This is only my third post, the last thing I need is the added weight of negative input as I’m trying to get off the ground.
As a bonus for putting up with my testing the waters, I’ve decided to do Halloween-themed watch lists every week through the end of next month. In the last issue, I talked about doing this every other post, but what the heck, there are only so many weeks before October’s end, and I had fun assembling the first one. I had even more fun with this one, as it draws from a subject near and dear to my heart (and the heart of practically every other dorky male in his 30s):
The Simpsons Did It
Four films parodied in Treehouse of Horror vignettes. How did I choose these four out of all of the different options? The short answer: I tried to think of what I’d like to watch in a sequence. With more than thirty Halloween-themed episodes, and multiple stories within each episode, there were many, many options, which means your favorite might be missing. If it is, let me know about it in the comments!
Island of Lost Souls
While the King Kong episode from Treehouse of Horror III is the more fun parody, Island of Lost Souls, referenced (along with the source novel and other subsequent takes) in a vignette from Treehouse of Horror XIII, is my choice for early horror on the list. It’s one of the greatest Pre-Code horror films, giving even the best of the Universal Pictures monster classics a run for their money. Charles Laughton’s giddy portrayal of Dr. Moreau sneaks in a shocking degree of malevolence, and the designs of the hybrid human-animal creatures remain a gold standard of movie makeup grotesquerie.
Nightmare on Elm Street
One of the most iconic horror films inspired one of the best vignettes in the history of The Simpsons’ macabre holiday episodes. Before he was a quip-happy cash cow, Robert Englund’s Fred Krueger (he’s not Freddy in the first film) managed to be the perfect avatar of nightmares. With apologies to Jackie Earle Haley, Groundskeeper Willie’s turn as the gruesome dream killer is likely as close as we’ll get to matching Englund’s performance. Seriously, watch the episode again and try to tell me Willie’s flaming skeleton doesn’t raise the hairs on your arms. Hell, even the gag where he manages to sweep up his own ashes is more unsettling than what you’ll find even in decent horror flicks.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula
This isn’t the only vampire film referenced in the Treehouse of Horror IV tale where Bart becomes a member of the fanged undead, but nothing is going to upstage the more ghoulish than usual C. Montgomery Burns in Gary Oldman’s Count Dracula garb. If you haven’t seen this version of the indelible vampire tale, be forewarned that this is far more outré than anything you could reasonably expect from a major studio release.
The Shining
It’s difficult to choose one episode as the best of the Halloween series, but if I had to pick, I would go with Treehouse of Horror V, which begins with a sly reference to the “friendly” studio warning at the beginning of James Whale’s Frankenstein, then jumps into another genre classic, The Shining. While there are many great horror films, few insist upon their legendary status with the gusto of The Shining. If you’ve seen it, you know this already. If you haven’t, it’s time to cross it off your list.
The Card Counter and America’s Faceless Places
In The Geography of Nowhere, James Howard Kunstler excoriates the modern American community by highlighting how absurd, disunited, and generally ugly the places where we live and work have become. He describes landscapes of disjointed and discrete properties that offend the idea of harmony, calls out broad, flat gouges of land paved over for the sake of our cars, and generally decries the broad exchangability of our different cities and towns.
The book was written in 1993, and while this type of community has taken an environmental toll due to its car dependence, and forced us into a persistent isolation from our community members, it has yet to encourage a renaissance of public transportation or civic-minded construction.
There are myriad reasons why this toxic and disharmonic state of affairs has persisted, but to keep things short, let’s just acknowledge that because the society of 1993 largely persists in 2021, the industries and people enriched by our 1993 standards of living are still being enriched today. This is broadly discomfiting if you have a sense of self-preservation in the face of climate change, but what I find personally discomfiting (and you might, too, if our backgrounds overlap) is how comfortable I am with the stultifying layout of modern America. I came of age in a suburb you could excise and successfully graft onto just about any other part of the country; it’s what I know from my most impressionable years, and if it doesn’t stir positive feelings anymore, it exudes a familiarity that can pacify me.
There is more to Paul Schrader’s new film, The Card Counter, than the featureless America it documents in its movement from one casino to the next. The traversal of these unmemorable and endless spaces is part of a larger assessment of a culture largely numb to itself, with a fixation on the continued fallout from our long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those conflicts in the Middle East have made one small class of people wealthy and left many of its participants hardened, haunted, or outright broken, but no matter their respective fortunes, the chief architects and pawns alike have returned to home to encounter the surface of a culture with a Teflon-like resistance to lessons or growth. It’s chilling to think so much carnage and cruelty inflicted abroad could inspire so little reflection at home.
Our protagonist, William Tell (played by Oscar Isaac), spends his time out of a military prison neither atoning for nor raging against his part in the war; he simply ekes out a living through card counting and a keen understanding of where a gambler’s meager advantages lie. It’s an austere life, one that leaves him without a home or companionship, but he seems to have sought it out, or at least found comfort in relegating himself to it. However, his itinerant lifestyle is disrupted when the son of a former squad mate (Tye Sheridan) shows up and dangles the possibility of redemption. Two possibilities, really, but to take this plot point further would reveal too much.
To make good on this new chance to do right, he accepts an offer from La Linda (Tiffany Haddish) to pursue bigger winnings through poker tournaments. What ensues is a patient trawl through forgettable swaths of the country, punctuated with drawn-out poker contests where we’re allowed to both savor the tension and see through the artifice: During one game, La Linda casually admits that the poker chips used for play grossly inflate the money actually being gambled. The top three winners will each receive handsome cuts, though none will take away the kind of winnings teased by the chip towers sitting on the gaming tables. It’s just another cheap veneer on something somehow smaller and even tawdrier than the trappings and players suggest.
The landscape is just one detail of many that comments on where we’ve found ourselves. We see it in the tedious conferences that blandly reveal violent tools of miitaristic trades and discuss eerie surveillance and interrogation technology in banal terms, and we also observe it in the other poker players, in particular a blustery foreign “patriot” who lustily chants, “USA! USA! USA!” with his entourage when he wins a big hand.
Throughout the film, Schrader is mindful of the distinction between debasement and actual ruin. For the most part, we are not confronted with truly repellent environments or structures in disrepair—according to Tell, even the prison wing where he was once situated remained largely in working order. Instead, we find serviceable motels, threadbare but palatable restaurants, and gaming palaces that offer perfunctory glamour and acceptable service. Without the disruption of a new person in his life, it’s not impossible to imagine Tell persisting with his roaming and gaming. He knows the rules, he keeps his head down, and he knows where most of the bad breaks lie. It’s a heartbreaking sufficiency, but a kind you could fall into even if you have no past from which you want to flee.
Too few films know how to capture the ahistorical and isolating aspects of American life without getting strident or going soft; David Lynch gave suburban life a famously surreal menace with Blue Velvet, but it isn’t always necessary to evince an uncanny edge to capture the uneasiness of the ordinary. On the podcast I co-host, Double Double Feature Feature, I based one of our episodes around two films that do this well, with one that does make use of an unseemly, dreamlike atmosphere and the other, like The Card Counter, milking the mundane for all its worth. The episode, a double feature of Carnival of Souls and The Friends of Eddie Coyle, is about more than just their locations; in each, the protagonist is stuck in a limbo that can only be sustained by a place that’s unconcerned with where someone will ultimately fall. With that said, their environments, their ostensible drabness and diminishing qualities, are too important to ignore. (Carnival of Souls, for the record, is the surreal one, while The Friends of Eddie Coyle hews as close to reality as possible, which manages to have its own disquieting effect.)
Much of The Card Counter, aesthetically and tonally, hit my viewing sweet spot. The music, the camera movements, and the way it both indulged in and danced around violence fit me like tailored underwear. I do have some quibbles with the film. Paul Schrader is known for ruminating on matters of the spirit in his work, pretty explicitly in the case of the recent First Reformed, but those elements feel tacked on in The Card Counter, and they don’t add to what’s already being discussed on political terms. Fair as it might be to question the toll that the horrors of war can take on the soul, the story just operates more effectively on social and sociological fronts than an existential one. However, that’s only a minor point of contention against a work that largely excels at exploring one man’s living afterlife in a country deadened to its moral and cultural shortcomings.