For some actors — say, Meryl Streep — critical attention is like a steady wave, bearing the recipient along for years or even decades in its unending swell. For other performers (Tom Hardy comes to mind), recognition is an altogether fickler creature and approaches only when the signs are auspicious. A startling talent with a penchant for demeaning himself, the 42-year-old Oscar Isaac belongs firmly in the second camp. Having delivered superb early-career turns in A Most Violent Year and Ex Machina, the leading man lost years of his prime as one more cog in the Star Wars machine. Watching him in the new film by Paul Schrader, however, it isn’t difficult to imagine Isaac becoming one of the most sought-after stars in Hollywood.
The actor’s role in The Card Counter is as William Tell, a career gambler who drifts from casino to casino, tilting the blackjack odds in his favor with an arcane system of mental tallies. Aware that pit bosses will expel such players if their winnings become excessive, William keeps his stakes low and ekes out a monotonous living rather than drawing attention to himself with flashy bets. It is only when our hero encounters former poker acquaintance La Linda (Tiffany Haddish) that his plans begin to change. William has recently befriended Cirk (Tye Sheridan), a troubled young man in obvious need of assistance, and joining La Linda’s “stable” of Texas Hold’em adepts will allow him to up his payouts and support his new companion.
Despite its card-centric setup and the Rounders-style voiceovers with which Schrader introduces various table games, The Card Counter is by no means a simple reiteration of the Matt Damon classic. To be sure, casino action receives abundant screen time, but the film’s true interest is both harsher and more surprising. William, a brooding ascetic who drapes his motel furniture in white sheets before bedding down, is a veteran of the Iraq War and a former guard at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison. Upon learning that Cirk’s father was a fellow interrogator driven half-mad by his experiences, William takes it upon himself to prevent the revenge scheme with which his friend has lately become obsessed.
Played by a surly Willem Dafoe, the object of Cirk’s wrath is Maj. John Gordo, an Abu Ghraib commander whom Cirk blames for his father’s brutal decline. Cirk’s idea, as straightforward as it is repugnant, is to kidnap, torture, and kill the major as an act of poetic justice. Though haunted by his own wartime culpability, William recognizes at once that Cirk’s plan represents its own form of insanity. Rather than allowing it to go forward, he convinces the younger man to join him on the road in the hopes of forestalling what is certain to be a life-defining mistake.
That The Card Counter is rarely less than intriguing despite the near absurdity of this plot is due, in large measure, to the work of Isaac in the central role. Blessed with a physical magnetism rare even in the upper echelons of movie stardom, the actor is utterly compelling in a part that requires both gentle forbearance and the intensity of a coiled snake. Such is the controlled fury of Isaac’s performance, in fact, that it soon alters the viewer’s understanding of the dynamic shared by William and Cirk. The latter may be the one threatening violence, but isn’t the former the likelier man to mete it out?
Like Travis Bickle, the antihero created by Schrader in 1976 and made immortal in Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece, Taxi Driver, William belongs to the fraternity of “man in a room” protagonists whose physical seclusion serves as a stand-in for moral isolation. In the case of Taxi Driver, Bickle’s enclosure is, of course, his yellow cab. William’s, no less symbolic but of far more questionable effectiveness, is the card table, where men and women do silent battle within a fog of mutual incomprehension. Observing William’s chair-bound inwardness, one appreciates the utility of the metaphor: Here is a man who has unfit himself for human connection. The problem, hampering Schrader’s latest like a bad pair of hole cards, is that William’s table games have nothing to do with the real action of the movie in purely pragmatic terms. In Taxi Driver, Bickle’s occupation quite literally drives the plot of the film, providing De Niro’s character with the opportunity to witness and react as he makes his way through the city. The Card Counter, by contrast, fails to connect William’s day job to the picture’s more urgent business on any practical level.
The result of this disunion is a movie that comes to seem entirely uninterested in the gambling narrative with which it is so frequently preoccupied. Though William rakes numerous pots, audiences rarely see his winning hand or participate in the drama of the flop, turn, and river. Head-to-head with his chief Hold’em nemesis, he abandons his seat midgame and never returns. To be clear, this is not a call for a poker-focused director’s cut. Nor can William redeem himself, a la Mel Gibson’s Maverick, with a well-timed royal flush. Instead, the solution is what ought to have been obvious in the post-production editing suite: not more card-table drama but significantly less.
As for The Card Counter’s darker storyline, viewers are likely to be of two minds. On the one hand, what better time than now could there be to flagellate our stumbling, defeated empire? On the other: an Abu Ghraib movie? In 2021? Who could possibly, at this point, still care? Like First Reformed, Schrader’s previous effort and a markedly superior film, The Card Counter sees the world as a series of wounds in need of healing. Yet, for better or worse, the wound that was Abu Ghraib has all but closed. We have others now.
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
