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.