Like some of the filmmaker’s other charismatically brooding sinners - Willem Dafoe’s crisis-ridden drug dealer in “Light Sleeper,” Ethan Hawke’s climate-conscious minister in “First Reformed” - William likes to sit alone in his room at night, nursing a glass of booze and pouring his dark thoughts into a handwritten diary from which he reads a few helpful expository excerpts. Schrader, being Schrader, means to draw those demons back out into the open, to put his gravely conflicted antihero through his own intensely personal yet oddly familiar stations of the cross. His demons have never left, but he’s holding them at bay. The routine suits him and keeps him busy. Now back on the outside, William spends his days hopping from casino to casino, playing just skillfully enough to beat the house without cleaning it out. Eventually he was court-martialed and incarcerated at Leavenworth, a rather nicer prison than his previous outpost finding a strange comfort in life behind bars, he read books, broadened his mind and learned to count cards. Years before he acquired that amusing pseudonym, he was a soldier stationed at Abu Ghraib, where he participated in the torture and interrogation of prisoners.
THE CARD COUNTER PROFESSIONAL
These images are long-ago memories that continue to haunt Isaac’s character - he’s the card counter of the title, a professional gambler who calls himself William Tell.
THE CARD COUNTER MOVIE
Nothing else in the movie is shot like this what we’re seeing is a visual aberration as well as a moral abomination. At one point one of their American captors (played by Oscar Isaac) enters the frame, his figure so distorted that he appears to be cut off at the knees. Equipped with a disorienting wide-angle lens, the camera takes us on a tour of these hellish environs, drifting through grotty cells where naked prisoners crouch in helpless terror, caked with their own filth. The nightmarish scenes of Abu Ghraib that punctuate “The Card Counter,” another long, dark night of the masculine soul from the writer-director Paul Schrader, look as warped as the images you might see in a funhouse mirror, minus the fun. Because moviegoing carries risks during this time, we remind readers to follow health and safety guidelines as outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and local health officials. The Times is committed to reviewing theatrical film releases during the COVID-19 pandemic.
0 kommentar(er)
