Starring: Mark Wahlberg, John Goodman, Michael K. Williams, Anthony Kelley, Brie Larson, and Jessica Lange
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Runtime: 111 mins. Reviewed in Feb 2015
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This American crime drama is a remake of Karel Reisz’s 1974 film of the same name. It features a gambler who is played here by Mark Walhberg in the place of James Caan. Like the original movie, the film’s story-line shares some similarity with aspects of Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1867) novella, “The Gambler”. In this film, The Gambler is given 7 days to repay his debts, and the movie counts back the days, one by one.
Jim Bennett (Mark Wahlberg) comes from a wealthy family and is a charismatic, popular University academic with a severe, gambling addiction. When he finds out that his inheritance is not what he expects he routinely embarks upon gambling as his solution. By personality, he is an impulsive risk-taker, and he is a high-stakes gambler. He constantly borrows, gambles, and loses.
He ends up owing massive amounts of money to loan sharks like Neville Baraka (Michael K.Williams) and Frank (John Goodman) and tries to cope with his predicament by ignoring the safety of his own life. He owes money to his own mother (Jessica Lange), who disowns him, as well as to criminal proprietors of gambling rings who threaten him. His gambling establishes a destructive pattern of borrowing from one person to pay another, and he doesn’t care at all about losing.
In his classes at University, he has students that provide him with the opportunity of using them to reduce his debts. One of his students, Lamar (Anthony Kelley) is a basketball prodigy and Bennett convinces Lamar to throw a game, under the threat of his student-girlfriend, Amy (Brie Larson) being killed if he doesn’t agree. Eventually, he wins enough money to pay his way clear, and the final scenes of the film show him running to Amy, to rescue a relationship he thought he had lost. One has no idea about whether he will gamble again.
Jessica Lange gives a particularly forceful portrayal as Jim’s hard-edged, loving mother, who battles with her son’s addiction and blames herself for her son’s failure. Her performance is fierce and emotionally convincing.
The moral implications of the behaviour of the characters in this movie are never really treated as issues, despite the introspective density of the film’s script. Bennett has an addiction to gambling that he constantly denies; his behaviour selfishly impacts on others; and the film skirts the edge of making gambling dangerously alluring. The movie has a lot to say about the human condition, but its comments are nearly always on the dark side, and the moral impropriety of Bennett’s actions and the inappropriateness of the sexual relationship that he establishes with Amy are never addressed.
Despite these faults, the film is extraordinarily powerful. The acting of Mark Wahlberg, John Goodman and Jessica Lange is particularly impressive, and the film creates compellingly the seamy, dark underworld of the gambling criminal culture. This is an intense movie, directed with forceful style, that shows addictive gambling as an illness. It presents no suggested solutions to the problem, and as a result it communicates uncertainty about its issues, and through that uncertainty it fosters ambiguity – which some would say is a trademark of the individuality of life that Dostoyevsky communicates so well through his key characters.
The film’s real strength lies in the complexity of Wahlberg’s portrayal of Bennett’s addiction. It is almost as if Bennett not only accepts his fate, but actively pursues and desires it. His gambling crises present us with thoughtful and reflective material, and the film is much less an action piece than a character one. Jim Bennett is “the kind of guy, who likes to lose”, and he risks losing everything, just in case he can pull himself back. At times, he tempts fate in order not to win, and the reasons for his self-destruction are ambiguous.
This is a dark and complex movie, with philosophical overtones, and a weighty script that shows the power of gambling to shape behaviour compulsively. It is a moody film with impressive acting and direction, and has a wonderful jazz soundtrack, which in one brilliant moment shifts the listener dramatically and unexpectedly over to the haunting melodies of Frederic Chopin’s “Tristesse”.
Laying aside the absence of concern that the movie demonstrates about the moral issues it raises, this is highly forceful, and engrossing cinema.
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