Movies about gambling and gamblers often carry existentialism pinned to their stories like a battle flag. In 1970s films like “The Gambler” or “California Split,” and more recent ones like “The Music of Chance,” the main characters are Dostoyevskian warriors or clowns, living in a world constantly on the edge. In that world, doom and disgrace breathe down their necks and the promise of instant wealth is a bright illusion, vanishing fast.
“Hard Eight,” an admirable debut film by young writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, looks at a mean little corner of the universe in Martin Scorsese’s “Casino.” It’s a simple story about an aging professional gambler who, inexplicably, takes a young wreck of a man under his wing and guides him into the gamblers’ special terrain, teaching him how to work the casino employees, beat the house. But it’s done with such intelligence and feeling, and such a brilliant cast, that it grips our attention from first shuffle to last bet.
As played by Philip Baker Hall, the older gambler Sydney is a riddle. In his 60s, impeccably dressed, he’s so quiet, so immaculately controlled, that his carefully chosen words take on a certain weight, almost a menace.
Sydney is the man with all the answers. And when we first see him, he’s walking toward a coffeeshop door, beside which, on the sidewalk, slouches the disheveled, unshaven and out-of-it John (John C. Reilly). When Sydney stops to talk to this vagrant, offering him a cigarette and a cup of coffee, he almost seems to be acting on impulse. Why should he feed John, then offer to stake him fifty dollars for a shot at the Reno casinos? Is he really worried about the six-thousand dollars John says he needs to bury his mother? Is Sydney that much a rarity: an unselfish and generous soul?
John, hangdog and suspicious, tells Sydney that if he’s trying to buy sex, he’s in for a beating. But the two wind up in Sydney’s car on the way to Reno, and then in the casinos, where Sydney’s advice is so adroit that John wins some extra money, a free room, and eventually gets his mother’s funeral expenses.
A year later the two are still in Reno, partners. Two other people enter the story: a cocktail waitress and prostitute named Clementine (Gwyneth Paltrow) and John’s friend Jimmy (Samuel L. Jackson), who says he’s a security man at one of the casinos. Sydney hates the easygoing, insinuating, insolent Jimmy almost at sight. But he seems taken with Clementine, and he nudges her into a relationship with his protege.
As this goes on, the background — the coruscating lights, the omnipresent buzz, the slot machines, the crap tables, the roulette wheels — supplies an ominous music. All around us, there’s greed and lust for easy money. Sydney, who seems almost Buddhist in his impassive expertise, at first shows a mastery of that world. But Sydney is also prone to bad judgment, notably during two times (once in the past, and again in the present) when he bets a bundle on the “hard eight”: double fours on the dice for a long-shot return. This is Sydney’s flaw. Or one of them.
Then, disaster strikes. For John, what happens next puts him at cliff’s edge over a raging sea. For Sydney, it’s simply another problem, albeit an extremely serious one. How he solves that problem — for John, Clementine, Jimmy and himself — makes up the movie’s stunning second half.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s script is smart and engrossing throughout. And, as a director, he has a quiet, somber eloquence that keeps us floating along in the story’s darkness. The four main actors — along with Philip Seymour Hoffman as an obnoxious young crapshooter — are excellent. Paltrow, a brilliant British intellectual in “Emma,” here plays, just as convincingly, a stupid, pretty Reno hooker. (More than Elisbeth Shue in “Leaving Las Vegas,” Paltrow gets a whore’s body language, wary smile and cliche patter.) Reilly, with his bulldog face, mumbling speech and shambling manner, easily catches neophyte John’s looseness of spirit.
As Jimmy, Jackson is so good, he’s scary. Here is a real champion of an actor, on the money every time. He has Jimmy’s dodges, moves and cons — his sudden, terrifying flareups and his phony camaraderie — completely figured out, thoroughly covered. His car-seat confrontations with Hall are classics.
Hall isn’t an actor much of the audience knows, except in passing, in supporting roles in films like “The Rock” and “Kiss of Death.” But he was great as the raging, drunken Richard Nixon in Robert Altman’s 1984 “Secret Honor” and he’s great here, too, in a different key. With his weary eyes, his soft voice, his slightly exaggerated gentlemanly bearing and that hint of danger underlying everything, Hall creates a letter-perfect portrait of a true damned soul, cards close to the vest.
“Hard Eight” is a movie about the gambler’s life and the people who live it, and also the people who live around its edges. But the film is also about the mystery of human behavior, the tunnels of the heart. By the end, we know Sydney’s agenda and the secrets of the other characters — or think we do. But, in a larger sense, Sydney remains an enigma, the ultimate outsider. The movie suggests that Sydney’s goodness — or maybe all goodness — is an enigma as well. What are the motives? What are the results? Who’s got the action? And what happens after the hard eight misses?
”HARD EIGHT”
(star) (star) (star)
Directed and written by Paul Thomas Anderson; photographed by Robert Elswit; edited by Barbara Tulliver; production designed by Nancy Deren; music by Michael Penn and Jon Brion; produced by Robert Jones and John Lyons. A Goldwyn Entertainment Co. release; opens Friday at Pipers Alley. Running time: 1:41. MPAA rating: R. Language, sensuality, nudity, violence.
THE CAST
Sydney …………………….. Philip Baker Hall
John ………………………. John C. Reilly
Clementine …………………. Gwyneth Paltrow
Jimmy ……………………… Samuel L. Jackson
Young Crapshooter …………… Philip Seymour Hoffman
