La doppia vita di Mahowny

In "Owning Mahowny," Philip Seymour Hoffman proved before his Oscar win to be one of the great actors of his generation, playing a compulsive gambler who embezzles millions from his employer, a bank. Dracula is in charge of the blood bank.

Mahowny is a fascinating character. He's a cheap slob who drives an old car. Though he loves his girlfriend (Minnie Driver), he hasn't confided in her. In fact, he lies to her, as he lies to everyone. His god is gambling -- not money, just gambling. As Frank Perlin (Maury Chaykin), one of the guys who takes his action attests, "He just wants to have the money to lose."

We watch Mahowny get in deeper and deeper, creating false loans and stealing from his clients. He becomes a VIP at an Atlantic City casino where he is given the best of everything and offered even more, but he's not going to do anything that takes away from his time at the tables. Unbeknownst to him, the Feds are interested in some of his associates and become curious about this Mahowny guy, thinking he may be in on a drug racket.

This movie will keep you hooked throughout. Hoffman is brilliant and even sports a Canadian accent (the film was made there and the real Mahowny is Canadian). Hoffman comes from my home town, and as we are close to Canada, he is familiar with the accent.

The rest of the acting is uniformly good, with the standout being the remarkable John Hurt as the casino owner who wants Mahowny to keep throwing money at the casino and will do anything to keep him there. The insight into the gambling world is amazing, and may keep you away from the tables the next time you're in Vegas or Atlantic City.

"Owning Mahoney" tells of a bank account manager and pathological gambler who lives from one wager to the next on a collision course with oblivion. A powerful and compelling tour de force by Hoffman - who once again proves he ranks among the actor's actors with the likes of Brando, Pacino, and Nicholson - this engrossing film claims to be a true story of a man, money, and an obsession of remarkable proportions. A worthwhile watch for Hoffman fans and anyone into character studies, particularly of obsessive-compulsive types. All others stay away. (A-)

This is a pretty safe and unremarkable project in many regards. The story is appealing as a sort of funny anti-hero, a resourceful guy with an uncontrolled urge to gamble. He steals so he can feed is habit, and everybody around him has money-related interests except himself. It's made more interesting to follow because it's based on a real story, and apparently it follows it quite closely.

Technically it's as good as most of Hollywood makes, competent in every aspect except direction, which is flat and dead. No defined camera stance, merely the basic representation of what's happening.

But nothing of that matters because who the camera frames almost always is the late Seymour Hoffman. And that is more than enough. Every movement counts, every restrained facial sign shows something. He was really a method student, but i suspect he didn't have to search very deep to get to his characters. His most remarkable characters all live in their own world, tormented by uncontrolled urges, in pain by maladjustment to an unforgiving unfit world. His pain was real in every character of his, he just channeled it each time to a different character, to a different world, to a different misfit quirky corner of the world.

It's an extra pain to watch each one of his movies now, when we know we won't see anything new from him ever again, and we understand that not so much of what he showed us was acting, faking on a stage, but instead was the masking of a real pain. Or it could be the other way around. It could be that, in a tragic sense, the high standard that Hoffman proposed for his own craft drained and exhausted the real man so much that he was left in the limbo between his full creations and the emptiness of the somehow unfulfilled real life, whatever that might be.

It's not difficult to watch this film now, and map the gambling urge of Mahowny to the addictions of Hoffman in the real life, and understand that the "just a few more minutes" could in fact be the few more minutes he always requested from himself.

watch this, the film won't change you, but Philip S. Hoffman will.

I'm not sure that it was a fantastic movie, but it really sticks with me. I gamble quite a bit too, and I regularly see Mahoney-like behaviours at the casino. The guy next to me the other day started with $200, then went up, in my eyes undeservingly, to about $2500, and finally lost it all in a matter of half an hour. The entire time completely without expression, like a gambler, like Mahoney. No matter what happens to a gambler in the short term, he knows that it is ephemeral. Unfortunately, the ephemeral losses are a bit bigger than the ephemeral wins, and the cumulative loss is what you are stuck with in the end.

I liked the way that Mahoney was so boring. As though the things that make life interesting for the average person and the things that make the average person interesting all pale in his eyes to the passionate communion that he has with the game.

Interesting examination of a young Canadian bank executive who embezzles money to feed an insatiable gambling addiction.

Hoffman gives a yeoman's if not overly subdued performance as Dan Mahowny, and the film for the most part is a better than average watch. Strangely, the film plops you right into chapter 5 or thereabouts, and your left wondering who is this guy for the entire film. The motivation for Mahowny's odd behavior is never really broached. The film starts with Mahowny sports betting and playing for the usual small stakes, he then mysteriously falls off a cliff in his wagering amounts and we're supposed to swallow that it all stemmed off of a 10000 obligation? Then we're off to the races as he becomes this casino legend. Needed a little more development, and thats being kind.

The direction is clever, in particular the ironic use of scenes showing the symbiotic relationship of bank and casino. On the nay side, the small budget generates the expected technical issues, most glaringly, never once providing camera-work that remotely convinces you he's in either Vegas or Atlantic City. The casino interior shots aren't properly done to eliminate the claustrophobic soundstagitis, and the only exterior shots found in the entire movie, are blatantly in Canada. As example, there is a scene where Mahowny is contemplating life while standing on the beach of the Atlantic Ocean. Its so obviously a lake or even pond and not the ocean, that its borderline embarrassing. Finally John Hurt, who i really like, is given liberty to really ham it overboard. But believe it or not, I genuinely like this film, and do recommend it.

PS/ I don't care that what anyone says, the woman who hits him up for 100 bux in the casino is Sandra Oh.