‘The Card Counter:’ Oscar Isaac Scorches In Paul Schrader’s Hypnotic, Slow-Burn Moral Thriller [Venice Review]

What if you’ve paid your debt to society, but the spiritual weight of what you truly owe for your past actions can never be repaid in full? Following the terrific comeback reception to “First Reformed” and the spartan, Bresson-ian transcendental style employed within, feeling good about his chances, filmmaker Paul Schrader doubles down on austere slow cinema again in “The Card Counter,” a movie about the moral balance a man can accrue. A gambling film on the surface, but really, a kind of hypnotic, slow-burn thriller about the twisted path to redemption, where Schrader’s latest differs from his previous film is its atmospheric broodiness. “The Card Counter” is, at times, stylish with a pulsing synth soundtrack, straight out of a William Friedkin or Nicolas Winding Refn movie, but still adheres to ideas of minimalism and asceticism, perhaps just not as severe.

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His protagonist, however, is a very familiar character. Starring an intense and deeply searing Oscar Isaac, “The Card Counter” centers on his William Tell character, a man who just got out of prison and, as the title suggests, learns to count cards inside. Like Ethan Hawke in “First Reformed,” and before that, his forefather Robert De Niro in “Taxi Driver,” Tell narrates his innermost intimate thoughts to the audience via a voiceover taken from his diary. Yet, unlike those men—in deep spiritual and existential crisis, sickened by the world around them, psychological powder keg’s ready to explode and unleash their horrible will on the world—Tell is seemingly in control of his destiny, his spiritual decay, and the demons eating away at him. Until, one day, he is triggered, and something dark is dislodged in the recesses of his guilt and unbending sense of principle.   

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Having learned to live by routine in jail, ritual and discipline are everything to Tell, including his diligent journal writing, which begins to reveal the cracks in his icy, seemingly meticulously crafted façade. Rigorous in his customs, the film equally exacting in its presentation of these ceremonies, Tell reinvents himself as a professional gambler on the American poker circuit, living a monotonous life, traveling from motel to motel, betting and winning modestly, and never gaining too much attention in the process. He’s like the mysterious Samurai monk of poker that lives by an unyielding code, one that nobody truly knows, but some, like gambling agent La Linda (Tiffany Haddish), are intrigued by.

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However, Tell is forced to confront the ghosts of his past upon the advent of a young man named Cirk (Tye Sheridan), searching for meaning after his soldier father’s suicide. Cirk unmasks Tells past as an ex-military interrogator in Iraq—the reason behind his imprisonment— after a chance meeting. Cirk wants revenge on Major John Gordo (Willem Dafoe), now a fat cat private security consultant, the sociopathic military man that trained Tell and the young man believes is responsible for his father’s death.

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Many men paid a heavy price for their actions at Abu Ghraib, spiritual, psychic, physical, or otherwise, fall guy patsies grunts like Tell and Cirk’s father, but Gordo evaded punishment and has done well for himself. What unfolds is an unlikely story, not one of revenge but of potential forgiveness and expiation. Perhaps Tell can atone for his sins by helping put Cirk on a new path, morally, financially, mentoring him, and “setting things right.” But Tell eventually learns the troubling shadows of the past will not release him so easily.

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Cinematically intense, clinical at first, but slowly more evocative and scorching as Tell’s journey grows bleaker and bleaker, “The Card Counter” is riveting but compels even further with its penetrating performances. Isaac is fierce, with an easily activated turn-on-a-dime menace. At times he’s an enigmatic blank wall, never showing his cards; other times, absolutely frightening when forced outside his comfort zone or compelled to deal with his emotions. If the body holds the burden of trauma and stress inside its muscles, its bone, and its soul, Isaac is the embodiment of how that damage—that most men don’t know what to do with—rots from the inside. What’s additionally impressive about the performance is the layers it slowly sheds. Tell seems so painstaking in his attention to detail, a man in control of everything, but as the movie progresses, we realize this is a pretense, keeping so much desperation, shame, and self-reproach at bay. He doesn’t self-flagellate physically, but self-recrimination is like a cancer inside that Isaac communicates with nary a word.

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Dafoe is barely on screen, but each second of his underlit visage is haunting, a marriage of visual and stillness that suggests something so evil and portentous. And Sheridan is absolutely convincing as the guileless, aimless, naïve kid— really a tragic and heartbreaking figure—who hasn’t truly thought out the expense of his misguided vengeance plan. Tiffany Haddish is a little bit of the odd person out, just slightly miscast, but also calculating in demeanor, thus not truly chafing against the film’s aims either.

Scored by Giancarlo Vulcano and Robert Levon Been of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, musically, “The Card Counter” slowly grows in intensity. By the end of the picture, it is audibly sweltering and throbbing with the unsettling mood set by Isaac’s foreboding Tell. Cinematographer Alexander Dynan (“First Reformed,” “Dog Eat Dog“) helps keep the movie tight and on edge, but some of the occasional tracking and crucial dolly shots go a long way with creating the picture’s mesmerizing disposition.

Capital A arthouse in tone, “The Card Counter” won’t be for all audiences to be sure. Its detached precision is potentially alienating, its somber characterization may be distancing, and some cineastes might believe Schrader has gone to the well once too often following the similarly sparse and despairing “First Reformed.” But it’s truly a wild, blazing ride if you get on the movie’s bruising, mesmeric wavelength, a tragic but deeply moral film about a righteous, transactional man who has truly weighed and considered the cost of the wicked transgressions committed against his country, his fellow man, and his own soul. [A-]

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