Review: The Card Counter Daringly Depicts a Man’s Search for Atonement

Paul Schrader’s film grows more heated and crazed as the chaos of the past bleeds into a repressed present.

The Card Counter
Photo: Focus Features

Writer-director Paul Schrader’s The Card Counter opens with a man named William Tell (Oscar Isaac) informing us in voiceover that he’s suited to incarceration. Serving an eight-and-a-half-year term in Leavenworth Penitentiary, William finds that he’s strangely comforted by routine, by wearing the same clothes, eating the same food, smelling the same smells. From the outset of the film, William is elucidating the neurosis that governs Schrader’s cinema at large, which often centers on alienated men who long for physical entrapment and annihilation as relief from the hellscape of their psyches.

In this context, it’s no coincidence that Schrader is so enamored with the finale of Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket, as it shows a protagonist freed from the figurative cage of compulsion via the reassuringly tidy constrictions of a literal cage. Schrader has repeatedly channeled the essence of that moment over and over in his work, including, now, in The Card Counter.

Tidiness is an obsession of Schrader’s. He irons wild and lurid premises out with curt dialogue, tightly controlled acting, governable metaphors and themes, and sharp and symmetrical imagery. It’s as if imposing rules on himself, such as those he identified in his seminal 1972 book Transcendental Style in Film, allows him to navigate the subjective process of art-making, just as constriction allows his antiheroes to make sense of the chaos of life as well as of their own minds. The Card Counter is very much a work in this tradition, and it’s frustrating, personal, and intensely moving for its stubbornness. He may be an elder statesman by now, with his legend cemented, but Schrader is still an admirably risky and furious artist.

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Like many of Schrader’s films, The Card Counter sounds like a run-of-the-mill genre outing on paper. At Leavenworth, William learns how to count cards, which he translates into a lucrative profession on the outside, hustling casinos for amounts of money that are too small to be worth the effort to flag. William is also haunted by a mysterious past that will gradually come to the foreground of the film’s narrative, and like many grifters in need of redemption, he enters the orbit of a family that serves as a symbolic surrogate for another: a troubled younger man, Cirk (Tye Sheridan), and a woman, La Linda (Tiffany Haddish), who stakes gamblers.

This setup recalls that of many a crime film with hustlers and protégés at their center, including Robert Rossen’s The Hustler and Martin Scorsese’s sequel The Color of Money. But Schrader dries the plot of The Card Counter out, slowing it down and homing in on the repetition of inhabiting and sterile tourist traps for a living. This lifestyle is an outgrowth of William’s yearning for imprisonment, which many of Schrader’s protagonists share.

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In The Card Counter, Schrader continually denies us routine pleasures, such as evolving character development, suspense concerning money lost or gained, the highs of winning, and sex appeal. In a more conventional film, La Linda would likely be an adversary, a love interest, or both, and while she and William form a bond, including a sexual one, the particulars of their relationship are of virtually no interest to Schrader. With the exception of a surprisingly beautiful moment in a city of lights, La Linda essentially exists as a nourishing pal, and the tamping down of the usually volatile Haddish in the role is among the most pointed of The Card Counter’s perversities. Similarly, the relationship between William and Cirk remains oddly formal, even as their friendship drives the film toward a startling catharsis. (Schrader does, though, allow us to enjoy the details of card counting, which are fascinating.)

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What Schrader adds in place of these elements is the tight, commanding sense of repression that runs through most of his films. William’s inability to loosen up, to act casually human and enjoy himself, mirrors the director’s hesitancy to indulge in genre hijinks. And the genre stuff is window dressing anyway, a misdirection, as Schrader is hunting much bigger game.

It’s revealed during William and Cirk’s first meeting that William was an “enhanced interrogator” at Abu Ghraib, and that he was in prison for appearing in the sort of pictures that sparked global outrage during the War on Terror. Meanwhile, the orchestrators of those operations, as in real life, moved on to lucrative careers. Representing those charlatans in The Card Counter is Major John Gordo (Willem Dafoe), and, in another of Schrader’s perversities, he’s the most charismatic person in the film. Gordo’s comfort in his own skin, and satisfaction with himself, is a disreputable relief for the audience from William and Cirk’s torment.

The stink of America’s war crimes gradually engulfs The Card Counter, which comes to feel like an atonement for Schrader’s last film about torture, Dying of the Light, which was recut by distributors into a chintzy thriller and disowned by the director. William’s stiffness and self-confinement make more and more sense as his past bubbles up, and is physicalized by a few of the most audacious sequences in Schrader’s career. Flashbacks to William’s role as a torturer for our military aren’t staged in the kind of verité style that’s become a cliché when it comes to representing such subject matter. Rather, Schrader frames Abu Ghraib’s cells using a fish-eye lens that curves the rooms in on themselves, suggesting infinite tunnels in a hell presided over by madmen. Schrader imagines the extremis of the psychology of the torturers and their prey, rather than distancing himself—and, by extension, us—from it with faux objectivity.

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Schrader dares to court tastelessness in these moments, conjuring a lurid atmosphere that’s at lacerating odds with the refinement of most of the film. He affirms the depravity of such seemingly unimaginable actions, and, once that depravity has been acknowledged, the film grows more heated and crazed as the chaos of the past bleeds into a repressed present. And so The Card Counter isn’t as stilted as it may initially appear to be. With his austere aesthetics, Schrader captures the barbarism bubbling underneath civilized society, suggesting that William’s rules, not to mention the filmmaker’s, are pretenses for keeping evil rationalized away from the forefront of the mind. Everyone, blissful in their routines, is complicit.

Given his knowledge of how close barbarism actually is to the surface of ordinary life, it’s little wonder that William finds life in prison to be a soothing cocoon, with particularly oppressive rules to keep his roiling mind preoccupied. Prison also offers William the comfort of knowing that he’s being punished, allowing him to offer a conceivable sacrament.

Score: 
 Cast: Oscar Isaac, Tiffany Haddish, Tye Sheridan, Willem Dafoe, Amye Gousset, Billy Slaughter  Director: Paul Schrader  Screenwriter: Paul Schrader  Distributor: Focus Features  Running Time: 111 min  Rating: R  Year: 2021  Buy: Video, Soundtrack

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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