Today Oscar Isaac Review: Paul Schrader's “The Card Counter” Is an Unwieldy Mix of Excuses and Guilt After Sept. 11, and Oscar Isaac Keeps It All Together
Today Oscar Isaac
Maybe you've heard all my screams and watched The Report, or you've seen The Mauritanian, or you're watching Alex Gibney's documentary The Forever Prisoner, and you know all about how the U.S. Department of Justice legalized torture after September 11, 2001, and how the CIA, the FBI, and The American military used these “advanced interrogation techniques” (EITs) and how the civilian advisers who invented these methods raised more than $80 million in their efforts, and how there are still people in Guantanamo Bay who have never been charged with a crime but have been detained by the United States for decades of and how Abu soldiers Ghraib who took pictures of his humiliation and abuse of prisoners only served a few years for their actions. If so, thank you for complaining! And yes, you should probably keep watching Paul Schrader's The Card Counter. I said “only a few years old” in this previous paragraph because I tend to believe that crimes such as torturing people, not getting information, torturing them even more, outwitting them for it, and then killing them in some cases deserve more punishment than people living in Abu Ghraib have. (And remember that the people in Abu Ghraib images are the only people whose actions were made public; the use of TSIs was more widespread.) I have become more frustrated and uncomfortable with the statement of “well, soldiers only listened to orders” over time, and I know this is my own rigid ideology. I also tend to think that someone will join in the argument that the apparatus of power that approved torture and trained soldiers for it should share the blame. That's true, of course; the post-9/11 period in American history is riddled with war criminals. But I wonder: Where is our national awareness of this? Where is the outrage or even recognition? When do we face the costs of such cruelty, complicity and despair?
I put all my feelings opposite because I reflected on them in The Card Counter, which follows First Reformed as another Schrader movie in which the director and writer seem to look at the world, wondering how it got so bad and trying to figure out how we react to it to be irreversible. Can we save humanity? Can we save someone else? Can we save ourselves? We are currently living in a time of sporadic national calculations when it comes to US actions after 9/11, when pop culture, which dares to deal with this issue in the first place, seems to be in existential opposition to itself. “We were wrong, but who was more wrong? “is a question that The Card Counter seems to be asking, and it puts that question on the lips of Oscar Isaac, whose performance in this film is another effort by the actor to push the project forward after Dune and Scenes from a Marriage.
This is the Triple Frontier Isaac, the Isaac, who can use sarcasm and cynicism as weapons against anyone who dares to believe that beautiful things could happen, that life could be fairer, that the world could improve. Isaac's character wears a certain uniform in this movie — all gray and black, thick sunglasses, a nice watch — and keeps his eyes down and his presentation clean and his voice calm, and it's an attempt at anonymity and control for a man who's been robbed of these for years. His silence is an effect (there is a scene in which Isaac's character invites you to be beaten in the mouth and then reappears and smiles with a sip of blood), and his smile approaches an observer, and the precision with which Isaac builds his titular protagonists sets the tone of this film from the beginning. When the film calls for a distorted version of parental warmth and a timid attempt at seduction, Isaac also easily turns towards those layers. Whatever the shortcomings of The Card Counter (and they exist in a slow first half, slightly confusing character dynamics and dominant soundtrack selection), they do not assume Isaac.
The card counter follows William Tell de Isaac (note the name), who tells us about the last years of his life through voice-over narration: 8.5 years at the United States disciplinary barracks in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he learned to count cards. He knows blackjack, he knows poker. He knows how to play against the house compared to playing against people, and he knows how to turn the advantages into himself. It requires patience and attention and a long memory, and Tell has had almost a decade to work on everything. “He was an American boy. Restriction of any kind was frightening for me,” says Isaac's Tell, and you should keep that in mind.
Tell brings in cash by playing on the betting circuit, heading out to different club and urban areas, winning a couple hundred or thousand dollars anywhere, and minding his own business. Schrader shows us Tell situated at a large number of tables, arm and arm with individuals who don't allow him another once-over, and that daily schedule and tedium appear to be a custom—like an exoneration. "I've met an adequate number of individuals," Tell says, yet is any individual actually an island? In the end, he makes two associations that will modify his expected existence of calm. In the first place, his consistency gets the attention of La Linda (Tiffany Haddish, having a great time with exchange like "I'm continually searching for a decent pure blood"), who runs a steady supporting players with untouchable speculation cash. They then, at that point, share the benefits, and Tell could make more—yet he would likewise be obligated to somebody, which he doesn't need. Until, at a club that is likewise holding a tactical show, he sees the feature discourse: "Ongoing Developments in Interrogation and Truthfulness," conveyed by a resigned Major John Gordo (Willem Dafoe).
Gordo and Tell share a horrendous history, and the cross-over gets the other person who will adjust Tell's direction: 20something Cirk (Tye Sheridan), who Tell epithets the Kid. The Kid perceives Gordo, and he perceives Tell, as well, and the arrangement he has for the two of them pushes The Card Counter forward. Through an awful, continuous stroll through a dark site office (its agitating, terrible quality intensified by Schrader's restrictive utilization of fish-eye focal points and colorful reflecting). Through betting circuit stop in the wake of betting circuit quit, during which Tell and La Linda develop nearer together. Through a revolting fight wherein we realize what Tell keeps in the gym bag he carries from inn space to inn room. "The apples weren't terrible. The barrel they came from was terrible," the Kid demands, however Tell isn't completely certain. What made him fit for the horrendous represents which he went to jail, and would he say he is fit still?
This is the place where Schrader's philosophy becomes obfuscated in a justifiable manner, as the film travels through squabbling over Tell's culpability, honesty, or responsibility. There's a motivation behind why Schrader and Martin Scorsese are such dear companions and teammates: They give similar sort of moral vulnerability to their heroes, and The Card Counter is committed to the subject of when a man's activities are his own, and what sort of weight they convey. Tell talks positively about viciousness being a cost your body retains everlastingly and regarding how effectively distress and contempt can be instructed, and probably about the force of absolution, and Isaac catches the inborn resistance in this man who isn't sure the last option can truly balance the previous. The viciousness that happens off screen in the film's penultimate scene, supplemented by Robert Levon Been shrieking, clattering score, further stresses that distinction. Maybe the last idea of The Card Counter feels like a retread of what Schrader has presented before as his answer for the world's most awkward moral inquiries, and maybe the film lets Tell off simple. Be that as it may, the conviction with which Tell says "Nothing, nothing can legitimize what we did," and the eagerness the film displays in attempting to manage the cultural and individual repercussions of America's most noticeably awful downfalls, makes The Card Counter as awkward, incendiary, and disastrous as Schrader at his best.
The Card Counter is accessible for computerized rental and video on request.
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