Review: The Card Counter

Image courtesy of Focus Features.

Writer-director Paul Schrader continues his winning streak - an apropos metaphor - with "The Card Counter," which follows "First Reformed," one of the director's great pictures about tortured men. His latest is rich in atmosphere and style, and while it's about a man who lives a shadowy life playing cards, that's not all that the film's about.

William Tell (Oscar Isaac) is the name that the card counter gives himself and, yes, this makes reference to the famed fable, but it's also an appropriate name, considering that poker players often look for the "tells" of other players to defeat them in the game. William is hard to read. We know he has a dark past, which is revealed slowly throughout the course of the film. At its beginning, he's being released from an eight-year prison stint, and we learn that it had something to do with his being an interrogator in the Middle East during the most recent wars.

Upon being asked by La Linda (Tiffany Haddish), a good hearted poker tour bankroll representative, why he spends most of his hours in dark casinos playing poker, he simply replies that he likes to play the game. But another conversation with a young man named Cirk (Tye Sheridan) leads to William explaining the notion of "tilting," which is when one is in power, but slowly losing control. He compares the tilting he experienced as an interrogator with the tilting one might experience in gambling. It appears that he overindulges in the latter to prevent himself from indulging in worse behavior.  The nonstop gambling prevents him from giving in to darker urges.

William takes to Cirk after the young man recognizes him at a casino. Cirk's father was in William's unit in the Middle East and went on to become abusive before committing suicide. Cirk's proposal to William - to kidnap and torture the leader of the unit (played by Willem Dafoe), who got off scot free, while others like William went to jail - doesn't exactly entice the older man, but William understands the pain Cirk feels and sort of takes him under his wing, bringing him along on the gambling tour, but not quite showing him the ropes.

The film has an intense vibe because it always seems as if William - who projects an almost too-cool demeanor - might snap or Cirk might draw him into a dangerous scenario. The picture is filled with moody, haunting scenes of dark casino rooms where William plays cards, and is scored with melancholic songs by the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club's Robert Levon Been. This all helps to enhance the film's haunting qualities.

At the center of it is Isaac, whose tensely low key performance is the type of under-the-radar acting that often gets ignored for flashier performances by critics. His portrayal here often struck me as a man who was working overtime to come off as nonchalant, but seems ready to explode in the wrong situation. Haddish and Sheridan give solid supporting work.

Schrader has long been a chronicler of disturbed men - he's responsible for the fantastic scripts for "Raging Bull" and "Taxi Driver" (which, much like Isaac's character here, keeps a journal from which we often hear excerpts), and has directed a number of very good to great movies, such as "American Gigolo," "Blue Collar," "Affliction," "Light Sleeper" and the 2018 critical smash "First Reformed." William Tell is another tortured soul that fits right into Schrader's wheelhouse. 

"The Card Counter" is the definition of a slow burn. It's a taut, moody drama with thriller qualities, and has a central character who remains compelling throughout because he is, like Haddish's character points out, somewhat of an enigma. The film ends in a place where you might expect it to, but there's a final shot that Schrader holds on for what feels like a long time, and it reminded me that the director has been a long-time obsessive of French filmmaker Robert Bresson's movies, which, much like Schrader's more grueling films, are works of humanism. "The Card Counter" is well worth your time.