The Card Counter

THE CARD COUNTER   ***

Paul Schrader

2021

IDEA:  A card shark with a shameful, traumatic past searches for redemption after taking a disaffected young man under his wing.

BLURB:  Like First Reformed, Paul Schrader’s The Card Counter is another austere, dark-night-of-the-soul character study of a man haunted by the state of the modern world, and by the weight of his actions in it. Here, Schrader substitutes casino card tables for pews; instead of a Man of God struggling to hold onto his faith, he burrows into the psyche of a man who lost his faith long ago, if he even had it to begin with. Oscar Isaac’s phlegmatic, emotionally coiled “William Tell” has more or less learned to live with the moral attrition that has curdled his life. Rather than rage or lament, he finds some measure of solace in his methodical, cyclical routine, a rigid and self-abnegating existence that’s just enough to keep his traumas at bay. Schrader keenly find his despair echoed and corroborated in his surroundings, from anonymous motels and strip malls to the airless, nearly subterranean spaces of gambling halls, captured in desiccated, flatly lit grays and browns. In Tell’s course-altering encounter with a troubled young man, and in his pained, circuitous path toward anything that might constitute absolution, Schrader repeats many of the themes and conceits of First Reformed, down to the specific image of his protagonist journaling at a table beside a glass of Scotch. The Card Counter may not feel novel in this light, but its anguishes – over the military-industrial complex and the legacy of institutional violence in particular – still carry a bitter sting. Ultimately, Tell’s torment is but an echo of a national moral reckoning infinitely deferred; and as he knows, the house always wins.

Streetwise

STREETWISE   ***1/2

Martin Bell

1984

IDEA:  A document of youth living on the streets in Seattle in the early-to-mid 80s.

BLURB:  In its gritty yet poetic vérité aesthetic, fragmentary storytelling, and non-moralizing sociological eye, Streetwise exemplifies an idiom of filmmaking that has become ubiquitous in chronicling the lives of the urban dispossessed. It also has roots in the traditions of neorealism and ethnography, in which the line between exploitation and empathy tends to get shrouded in difficult-to-disentangle problems of ethics, aesthetics, and structures of power. Streetwise in many ways amplifies the questions around these issues; how, for instance, did the filmmakers navigate the legal terrain of filming minors, many of whom likely didn’t understand the consequences of broadcasting their frequently self-incriminating behavior? It’s startling to witness these kids stealing and prostituting themselves, a feeling that stems not only from the reality of the situation, but from the fact that Bell, McCall, and Mark had the permission to capture it on screen. To their enormous credit, they neither condemn nor romanticize the kids’ marginalized existences, nor do they succumb to the temptation to psychoanalyze them. Letting their subjects narrate their own stories with a mix of vulnerability and bravado, they create a nuanced, moving portrait of makeshift community and survival, of youth claiming agency against the odds. They have palpable love for the charismatic, scarily self-possessed kids, not their circumstances; they admire their daring, cunning, and even their posturing belligerence because they understand how critical these qualities are as tools of endurance. Rather than try to facilely answer for the ethical questions inherent in its premise, Streetwise embraces what is thorny, discomfiting, and unavoidably sad about a reality that isn’t amenable to easy solutions.