Featured Photo by Ben Lambert on Unsplash

Spoilers Ahead

The Card Counter is an entertaining but odd movie. I know nothing about casinos or gambling or playing cards, so I went in with the expectation that I would take everything as it is and not get hung up on trying to understand logistics. The runtime went by faster than I thought it would; this is one of those rare movies that doesn’t feel 2 hours long, though I’m not sure if that’s a good thing in this case.

The movie’s about an ex-military dude, William Tell (Oscar Isaac), who takes up playing cards at casinos after a prison stint; this is basically the only thing he does with his time, by his own admission.

William lives in motels with the winnings from his card playing. He has a routine of covering all the motel furniture with white fabric, removing the wall paintings, unhooking the phones and clocks, and journaling at a desk with his bottle of liquor. I don’t know what any of this ritual is supposed to mean or represent, except for the obvious; journaling helps him process his guilt and his past.

He meets La Linda (Tiffany Haddish), another card player who eventually sets him up with financial backing, and then Cirk (Tye Sheridan), a college dropout who’s brewing a revenge plot he wants William to be a part of. And there’s a significant reason why it has to be William who helps him. William was part of a military interrogation unit in Abu Ghraib headed by Major John Gordo (Willem Dafoe); the soldiers involved were sentenced to prison for their tortuous interrogation techniques against civilians. Cirk’s dad included. Gordo, however, conveniently escaped serving any time, along with the other superiors of that program, as they were never depicted in the photographs that revealed the abuse and led to the sentencing.

So, my issues with this movie…

William trusts Cirk too much and too quickly. Or more like gets attached to him too quickly. I get that he wants to steer Cirk away from his destructive path of killing Gordo and give him a second chance. Cirk’s father killed himself in the fallout of his prison release and alcohol addiction, so maybe William feels he has to support Cirk in some fatherly way since both ex-soldiers were part of the same program. But it’s ridiculous that William gives Cirk thousands of dollars and then actually expects him to give up his murder revenge scheme.

Through their entire time knowing each other, Cirk is distant and reticent. Someone as aloof as Cirk doesn’t strike me as the type who’ll hold up his end of a deal, especially when he’s already made it clear he’s dead set on completing his “mission.” It’s possible he does give his mother most or all of the money, as we see proof of their conversation, but his plot was always going to be put in motion. I don’t know if he expected to be killed carrying it out in one last “fuck it we ball” move, but obviously, he doesn’t plan on Gordo being left alive. Yet that’s exactly what happens in the aftermath.

Again, I guess I have to suspend some disbelief about William immediately deciding to be all in with Cirk and going out of his way to help him. This lack of a convincing dynamic between the two men may also tie into a problem with the movie’s pacing, though. William says he’ll only accept financial backing for one year at the most to get enough money to pay off the boy’s debt. Toward the end of the movie, that World Series of Poker event is supposed to be the last one he does. Has an entire twelve months really passed between the time the three of them meet and that event? Because that seems impossible. There’s no real sense of time within this movie at all. Does a week pass? A month? It feels like the characters are all still trying to get familiar with each other despite a growing romance between William and La Linda. The three of them barely know anything about each other, and this is pointed out by La Linda several times. Maybe that’s supposed to lend a mysterious air or moodiness, but all it does is create a sense of inauthenticity in their relationships with each other.

(Oscar and Tiffany tapped into the romantic tension well, at least, because I could literally feel that “Is something about to pop off?” vibe whenever they interacted. Or maybe that’s because I already knew there’d be a sex scene before I watched the movie. 🤷🏾)

Speaking of, the acting needs a paragraph of its own. Tiffany Haddish is acting in a different movie from everyone else. Particularly at the beginning, it’s like she’s just reading the lines out; her delivery of dialogue doesn’t always have the natural quality of conversing with someone, even when her character is speaking to the man she clearly likes. Honestly, Tye Sheridan has this line delivery problem at times, too. And I know Tiffany’s more of a comedian, but skilled comedians know how to adapt. Between the two of them, these weird acting choices give the movie overall an awkward tinge. Willem Dafoe doesn’t have enough screentime to make a difference to me.

Not to be biased, but Oscar is hard-carrying this one. The scene in the cafe where William tells Cirk about his experience in the torture unit is the stand-out of this film.

One thing I wondered about: Why does William still carry around his “tools” if he’s so haunted by the fact that he used to torture prisoners? After thinking it over, I suppose this implies an inherent darker nature he can’t escape—that he really does enjoy doing terrible things to other human beings despite the guilt of knowing it’s wrong. His actions have left their mark on him, yet he’s not unwilling to go back to that headspace if he thinks it’s necessary. He makes a very quick decision to torture and murder Gordo once Cirk is shot by him, which isn’t the move of someone who wants to put their violent past permanently behind them—or believes they have the ability to. There may even be some element of the sunk cost fallacy at work; he’s already tainted himself by enacting such harm on others, so what does it matter if he goes farther down the rabbit hole.

There’s no sense of satisfaction in the scene where he brings these tools out, though. I’m not saying William has to use them on Cirk and give us some gory sequence, but it’s almost like an empty, left-field gesture. The two men talk casually at the casino, William becomes agitated after Cirk says he’s done with the nightlife, and then William takes him back to the motel where he roughs him up. William acts half-crazed, and we begin to realize that maybe he’s not the decent, repentant guy he’s tried to make himself into, but it doesn’t land because he doesn’t follow through on this behavior…at least not immediately.

If you haven’t seen this movie yet, whether you decide to watch it based off of this information is up to you. Despite my complaints, I’m not warning anyone against it. I do enjoy this movie. I watched it twice to write this review, and I’d watch it again easily. A movie doesn’t necessarily need to be great for me to like it. It just needs to hold my attention for ~2 hours and have a plot I can be engaged with, which this one succeeds at.