I am gratified to report that I’ve seen Paul Schrader‘s The Card Counter, and so that’s one film, at least, that I can write about before the Telluride Film Festival begins. I’ll most likely post my review concurrent with the Venice Film Festival debut. I could share a vague impression or two, but let’s hold off for now.
Okay, I’ll say one thing — for the most part The Card Counter is a smart, engaging, carefully measured and intriguingly detailed portrait of another solemn and lonely man…a classic Schrader character with a guarded way of being and living and surviving. But then Schrader promised this chapter-and-verse a year ago…
Schrader to L.A. Times guy Mark Olsen on 9.11.20: “I don’t want to get too deeply involved in the plot, but what I will say is [that] over the years I’ve kind of developed my own little genre of films. And they usually involve a man alone in a room, wearing a mask, and the mask is his occupation.
“So it could be a taxi driver, a drug dealer, a gigolo, a reverend, whatever. And I take that character and run it alongside a larger problem, personal or social. It could be debilitating loneliness like in Taxi Driver. It could be a midlife crisis [as] in Light Sleeper. It could be an environmental crisis like in First Reformed.
“So now I have a character and he’s in his room, he’s alone. And he has a mask on. And the mask he wears is a professional poker player. And the problem that runs alongside him is that he’s a former torturer for the U.S. government. So it’s a mix of the World Series of Poker and Abu Ghraib.”
That said I’m still a bit thrown by the poster that came out a few days ago…
