There’s a scene in Paul Schrader’s latest examination of the American male psyche, where Oscar Isaac’s eponymous antihero William Tell sits his young protégé Cirk (Tye Sheridan) in his motel room for a serious talking to. Dread envelopes the pair due to the ambiguity of the situation. “Any man can tilt,” William ominously tells Cirk. He’s describing the way both a card player and a military interrogator, roles he has expertise in, can increasingly force a hand, without achieving the desired results.
It’s one of The Card Counter’s few arresting and intriguing scenes, and is symbolic of Schrader’s love for leading men ready to tilt themselves – from Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle to First Reformed’s Ernst Toller – but for all its moody moralising The Card Counter is a slow-burn bluff with little new to offer.
The writer-director wields his favourite lonely man trope to through the eyes of Isaac’s small-time gambler. William’s voiceover and diary entries, written with expert penmanship in motel rooms made even more nondescript by his compulsive habit of covering every bit of furniture with sheets, deliver tips, tricks and context for how he learned card counting.
Flashback scenes are contrasted with the mundane, dimly lit and grey existence of William’s low-profile gambling world. It soon leads to higher stakes once he teams up with Tiffany Haddish’s likeable financial backer La Linda and takes Cirk under his wing: He wants to give the kid a second chance on life and thus assuage his own guilt.
It’s a testament to Isaac’s simmering screen intensity and Robert Levon Been’s melancholic score that the story doesn’t completely wilt under some stilted dialogue, repetitive card games and bland performances for underdeveloped supporting characters that fail to ignite.
While there are some atmospheric and absorbing moments, all involving Isaac monologuing or close-ups on his face depicting stormy thoughts brewing underneath, Schrader ultimately abandons his subplots in favour of a two-fold ending that is both anticlimactic and empty.
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