Could such a life look like, which the madness of the world can no longer harm? You show up at the casino every night, sit quietly at the blackjack table, and ignore your fellow players like they’re nothing. Keeps the stakes small, counts the high and low cards in the dealer’s hand, and waits for the math of the game to turn and the dealer has the worse cards. Then you get in and, exactly according to the laws of probability, you win about five hundred dollars. And goes. Count money, sleep, wake up, come back. Repeat.
This is the life William (Oscar Isaac) chose for himself. A look into his sad eyes gives an idea of why. Here nobody asks for his references or his past, here he doesn’t have to please anyone, obey no boss, follow no trends and endure no criticism. Everything happens between him and the cards, even the croupier doesn’t matter, a henchman of the inevitable. Williams’ only enemy is greed. If greed awakens in him and his method yields too much profit, he is threatened with being banned from the casinos. Or, if he plays riskier games, ruin.
One likes to follow this man in the film “The Card Counter”. In its clarity, restraint and modesty lies a pleasant element of calm. Oscar Isaac, who was also a “Star Wars” pilot and sad hero of the Coen brothers, has gray streaks in his hair and an expression of world-weariness on his face. Both suit him perfectly. And yet this protagonist must be completely broken inside: he can only endure motel rooms, for example, if he wraps all the lamps and furniture in white fabric and cords, a rare obsessive-compulsive disorder, but the result of which looks beautiful. Let’s call it Christo Syndrome.
Writer-director Paul Schrader doesn’t keep a secret for long about what’s troubling this hero. A Nightmare reveals it, filmed in highly distorting, wide-angle, fish-eye lens. Inside the horror scenes of the leaked images seen from the Abu Ghraib military prison in Iraq, a jumble of torture and humiliation and heat and excrement. Right in the middle William in uniform. He was one of the American torturers whose pictures went around the world, was charged and served eight years in military prison. Formally, his debt is now settled. But the madness of the world he’s trying to escape from could catch up with him at any moment.
It is said that only those who were in the torture photos were persecuted
Restlessness is therefore not good for him. Not by La Linda (Tiffany Haddish), who keeps an eye out for talented players in the casinos and wants to persuade William to make it big in poker tournaments – she would get the starting capital if he shared the winnings with her. Nor by young Cirk (Tye Sheridan), who is on a reconnaissance mission that could turn into a vendetta. He recognizes William from the leaked torture pictures that went around the world at the time. And he wants to know what it was really like in Abu Ghraib.
Cirk’s father was also a soldier in the torture prisons, he also came back a psycho wreck, but violent, ruined the lives of his son and his wife and then committed suicide. “You were the scapegoat,” Cirk tells William, “as was everyone in the photos.” But what, he asks, is about all the superiors who have never been punished? What about the system of torture, wanted and covered all the way up to the American President?
William wants to shake off those questions and thoughts. “They’ll eat you up otherwise,” he says to Cirk. In particular, he has to repress the memories of Major Gordo (Willem Dafoe), a torture architect from the very beginning, who committed his crimes in Iraq as a “civil contractor” – and was therefore never persecuted, just wealthy. We should take revenge and kill this Gordo, says Kirk. William doesn’t respond.
But then he comes out of his snail shell of cards and numbers. Takes the boy on his casino trips to give him better ideas. Call La Linda to compete as a poker player. The high poker winnings should enable Kirk to study, pay off his debts and bring about a reconciliation with his mother. And when La Linda takes an interest in him privately, William begins to reconsider his life as a recluse. The three of them form a strange, almost happy team that is reminiscent of a small family and looks towards a better future. If—yes, if the seeds of violence sown in Iraq’s torture prisons weren’t already planted deep within Cirk and William.
The psychoses of entire epochs are concentrated in Schrader’s tormented male figures
Men who shoulder the suffering of the world on their narrow shoulders, in whom the crimes and psychoses of entire epochs are condensed – that has always been one of the specialties of the cinema narrator Paul Schrader. He created his most famous character of this kind while he was still an author – the “Taxi Driver”, God’s loneliest man, plagued by the dirt and chaos of New York in the 1970s and the violent cleaning fantasies that followed. Robert de Niro and Martin Scorsese brought him to enduring ghostly life.
Then followed Richard Gere as the “American Gigolo” who sold himself for the pretty finishes in the ’80s, and later Willem Dafoe as the “Light Sleeper,” a drug mule and ex-junkie unfamiliar with the promises and ravages of America’s auto-med madness got loose. Oscar Isaac as “Card Counter” is a worthy continuation of the series of these large portraits. The film is one of the best of the past year. Here, too, an epoch is unfolding – the rampages of a battered empire unleashing its basest instincts under pressure. Here, too, blood must be paid for.
But since the “Gigolo” there has been a glimmer of hope at Schrader, which is solely due to the women. They are not innocent either, they are always involved in business and illusions, but at the decisive moment, when everyone turns away, they show kindness and courage. And so this time again, when in the end one has to atone in emptiness and loneliness and meaninglessness, the sentence of hope that has almost become a signature of Schrader resounds: You have a visitor. You have visitors…
The Card Counter, USA 2021 – Director and Script: Paul Schrader. Camera: Alexander Dynan. Starring Oscar Isaac, Tiffany Haddish, Tye Sheridan, Willem Dafoe. Distribution: Weltkino, 112 minutes. Theatrical release: March 3, 2022.