THE CARD COUNTER
Poker face: Oscar Isaac as
gambler William Tell.
★★★★
OUT 5 NOVEMBER CERT TBC / 112 MINS
DIRECTOR Paul Schrader
CAST Oscar Isaac, Tye Sheridan, Tiffany Haddish, Willem Dafoe
PLOT William Tell (Isaac) is a lonely gambler who travels around from motel to motel, competing in small-stakes casino card games. When two people emerge with ties to his military past, secrets begin to spill, and the composed front he presents at the poker table starts to break.
APTLY ENOUGH, THE Card Counter is a film that keeps its cards close to its chest. What is this slow-burn study of a soldier-turned-gambler really about? Being a movie by revered writerdirector Paul Schrader, it unsurprisingly centres on a solitary male loner who diarises their existence from an empty room: Oscar Isaac’s enigmatic protagonist here falls into a tradition that stretches from troubled pastor Ernst Toller in 2017’s First Reformed, all the way back to Travis Bickle in the Schrader-written Taxi Driver. At first glance, it looks like a new entry in the forgotten genre of gambling dramas: there are shades of Robert Altman’s California Split here, with Isaac decked out in a jacket straight off the shoulders of Steve McQueen in The Cincinnati Kid. But The Card Counter’s set-up turns out to be a sublime sleight of hand. The closer it gets to its pulsating conclusion, the clearer it is that this is a movie less about betting it all on black, and more about the black moral heart of America’s war machine.