Il collezionista di carte

"I never imagined myself as someone suited to incarceration." William Tell (Oscar Isaac)

Having written Taxi Driver and directed First reformed, Paul Schrader knows something about deeply-troubled souls, especially haunted taxi drivers and small-town cops. Now add card counting loner.

In The Card Counter, former army interrogator Bill has turned card champion while relishing his 8 ½ years in Fort Leavenworth for, it would seem, brutality at Abu Ghraib as a grunt guard. "Relished" because of the control prison afforded him, where he learned his card-playing trade. Nothing has helped him, however, to expiate his sins and redeem himself until he meets young Cirk (Tye Sheridan) and La Linda (Tiffany Haddish).

Experience the most accomplished cinematic anti-hero of the year-Bill roams the landscape of mid-west casinos, forgettable and banal, peopled by losers and wannabes looking for a romantic hit, even as the house controls their fortunes like a wizard pulling the strings of fate and laughing at his victims' impotence. Except for always-in-control Bill, whose days of interrogation control, taught to him by a sadistic major Gordo (mustachioed Willem Dafoe, inscrutably eccentric and scary), and who bets small and wins small to avoid being ejected for what he is, an accomplished card counter haunted by the ghosts of his tortured and torturing past.

The exposition is slow, more distributed than immediate disclosure. This pace lets the audience sink into Bill's world of gambling and isolation as he reveals in voiceover his thoughts about the lives he ruined and the officers like the major who escaped punishment. While Isaac steadily plays Bill with a smoldering intensity, the future begins to loom large while he and Cirk plan a reconciliation for Cirk and his mother, a consummation with La Linda, and a Dantean end for the major. In the first lies the seeds of Bill's redemption while in the last lies the revengeful legacy of an Abu Ghraib that just won't go away.

Shrader's shots are either long, to establish the emptiness of the casinos, or rapidly roaming to heighten the horror of scary Abu Ghraib, frequently tracking the anti-hero in his measured quest to control and win. As a knight errant, he meets his lady in La Linda, whose place in this man's world as a master of a stable of players is never fully realized, so obsessed is Schrader with his saturnine sociopath. In that regard, Isaac gives one of the year's most nuanced performances in the tradition of the lost but deadly Travis Bickel in Taxi Driver. Isaac is one of his generation's best actors, like Tom Hardy, whom you might forget except for the memorable characters he plays like William Tell. And Schrader does tell as powerfully as he ever did.

Just don't expect to learn how to play better poker, for The Card Counter is all about people-if you're good at the game, it's because you can look past the cards into the soul of your opponent. Paul Schrader is just such a soul-searching writer/director. BTW-Martin Scorsese is a producer and presents the opening title card--no surprise there.

Whenever I see "such and such presents" on the cover of a movie I think to myself oh no, this movie obviously isn't very strong and they need to attach a good filmmaker's name to it to try and trick people into thinking it's good. I hoped that wouldn't be the case with 'The Card Counter' but it absolutely was. This movie was a bit of a mess.

There are a lot of scenes where the lead character narrates different casino games and explains how best to win them. There is the odd interesting one like the card counting explanation, however most of them are embarrassing to listen to when you know a thing or two about casino games. They are both over-dramatised and over-simplified at the same time.

The film itself is just bizarre. Characters find connections without the film doing anything to sell them to us. We are just supposed to accept them. It's really odd. Also for a large portion of the film we have no idea what the point is. Things just kind of drift along and you wonder why you are even watching this. Then at the end it tries to make up for all that lost time, but again it is just so out of place, unearned and unusual that it has no effect on you at all.

I wanted to like this film, I really did. The premise sounded so good in the synopsis. I assure you though, the promise of "cinematic intensity" is not lived up to for one minute. This is one of the least intense films I've ever witnessed. I'll generously give this a 5/10. Not one I'd recommend.

I thought this film was going to be about a blackjack player, but I was pleasantly surprised that it was more of a Texas Hold'em experience. The film was directed by the talented Paul Schrader and stars Oscar Issac as the gambler. It also features Willem Dafoe in a cameo. The Dafoe character is very shallow, and we have no idea about how he became the person he was. However, the character exploration of William is much better. Two other characters are also featured; Tiffany Hadish as La Linda, the romantic interest for William, and. Tye Sheridan as Cirk (as in jerk). Too much Abu Gharib torture crap and not enough pyscho-poker. At times, vaguely reminiscent of Taxi Driver due to the driven personalities of the similar protagonists, but Taxi Driver far more effective. A decent take on the miserable, lonely, depressing, and meaningless existence of gamblers, and how casinos are not exciting and fun places to be; they are quite the opposite. Family is far more important.

This is not really a review, it should be taken more as a collection of impressions of the film.

Incredibly underrated film that amazed me beyond belief thanks to its perfectly blended plots and subplots that create a beautiful dark atmosphere full of anxieties and uncertainties. In general the film is really well done and the acting is wonderful and this helps perfectly in the characterization of these very complex and multifaceted characters. Having said that, however, it must be said that the film is very underrated because its value as a thriller is great and even just the poker games cause incredible anxiety.

I so wanted to like this movie. And I did up to a point. The gambling topic and casinos are always an interesting topic to me. Seeing the Martin Scorsese name associated with it, I expected greatness. The movie had an interesting look to it. It did move slowly at times as the main character (William) was a moody, thinker type the entire film. That character trait did add drama to the story because you just didn't know whether he was sane, insane, a good guy, or bad guy. As the storyline progressed, we started seeing the dark, hidden past that haunted him. Where it fell apart for me was the final 15 or so minutes. Time and distance realities seemed to go into fantasyland and the viewer was expected to just accept the unbelievable in order to get to the movie finale. For a serious drama, I found that unacceptable. This movie can be considered a deep thinker movie and I can see some people truly liking the ending. I just felt disappointed and was hoping for a better climax to what was an interesting lead up to it.

(BTW: Blackjack card counting, assuming no devices are used to do it, is not illegal or cheating in the U. S. as someone alluded to in their review. Casinos don't like it because it can hurt their profit margin and if they suspect a person is doing it to their financial success, they can ban them from their privately-owned business property. It would be difficult to prove someone actually is doing it anyway).