PLOT: An ex-military interrogator (Oscar Isaac) makes his living as a low-stakes gambler. Haunted by his past actions, which resulted in a jail sentence, he encounters a kid (Tye Sheridan) on his journey, who is connected to his former CO (Willem Dafoe), for whom he took the fall.
REVIEW: Let me preface this review by saying that First Reformed is probably my favourite film of the last decade. I was shocked by how deeply it affected me, as I’ve always been hit and miss with Paul Schrader’s work as a director. I didn’t expect him to pull off a later career masterwork like that, but here we are. As such, all eyes are on his follow-up, The Card Counter.
While not as miraculous and singular a work as First Reformed, it’s nonetheless a strong follow-up for Schrader, who, at seventy-five, seems to be attacking his new work with a sense of vigour and vitality that people half his age would be lucky to possess. Thematically, it returns to a familiar genre for the writer-director, that of a loner trying to exist in a world that’s passed them by to some extent. It feels very similar to his underrated Light Sleeper, in which Willem Dafoe played a kind of everyday drug dealer. In The Card Counter, Oscar Isaac plays a similarly low-key gambler. The last scene in The Card Counter feels like a direct call-out to that film, as does the song score by Robert Levon Been, whose father composed a similar soundtrack for the older film.
Isaac’s character, who answers to the name William Tell (perhaps a touch heavy on the symbolism), is a former guard at Abu Ghraib, who tortured prisoners under a brutal commanding officer, played here by Dafoe. Fresh off an eight-and-a-half-year stint at Ft Leavenworth, he’s used the time inside to better himself. He’s now an expert card counter who ekes out a modest living going for small casino scores. He stays in hotels, where he covers all of the furniture in white sheets and seems to yearn for the order of his former prison life (as he says in his voiceover, “I never thought of myself as a man well-suited to incarceration”).
Isaac is terrific as Schrader’s haunted lead. In many ways, he really feels like the second coming of Al Pacino, and this is another movie that should boost his reputation. As in First Reformed, his buttoned-up character gives us insight into his psyche via a journal he keeps. Otherwise, this is starkly different. That film was all about austerity; The Card Counter is more flash, similar to the casinos it takes place in. Schrader opens the scope up (slightly) from 1:33:1 to 1:66:1, although he opts for scope during the flashbacks to Tell’s time as an interrogator, using an unnerving fisheye lens.
While Isaac’s show, he’s ably supported by Tye Sheridan, as the son of another guard who went down for following Dafoe’s orders at Abu Ghraib. He wants to torture and murder Dafoe (a surprisingly small part – although no one plays venal like Dafoe), but Tell has other ambitions. Instead, he wants to help the kid get back on his feet financially and put these ideas behind him, so he takes him under his wing as an apprentice gambler. They’re staked by Tiffany Haddish (excellent in a rare dramatic role) as a woman who runs a stable of gamblers (and is similar to the drug supply played by Susan Sarandon in Light Sleeper).
Of course, being a Schrader film, the third act is unnerving and shattering, if somewhat more forgiving than the open-to-interpretation ending of First Reformed. While not for all tastes, it’s an intriguing character study that proves Schrader’s comeback is the real deal. It’s not First Reformed (what is), but it’s a good film on its own merits.