HARD EIGHT A film review by Chris Loar
Starring Philip Baker Hall (Sydney), John C. Reilly (John Finnegan), Gwyneth Paltrow (Clementine), Samuel L. Jackson (Jimmy) Written and Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
HARD EIGHT is Paul Thomas Anderson's debut feature, and it's not so different in most respects from his much-hailed BOOGIE NIGHTS. True, NIGHTS offers us an Altman-esque sprawl of story and character, while HARD EIGHT focuses on a small cast and a simple tale. But Anderson is repeating himself thematically, and those who liked NIGHTS' family of porn stars and low-grade filmmakers will also appreciate the strange, slightly seedy surrogate family he creates here. One hopes that Anderson will start to broaden his horizons a bit, but the fact remains that in HARD EIGHT we have a competent piece of storytelling from a precocious young director; the film is a vehicle for some very good performances and has a pleasant visual style that hints of better things to come.
HARD EIGHT is essentially the story of Sydney (Philip Baker Hall), an aging gambler who takes a young fellow named John Finnegan (John C. Reilly) under his wing, becoming a stand-in father to him. We meet both Sydney and John during the film's prologue outside a dingy roadside coffeshop in Reno. John is sitting outside in the dirt, very visibly down on his luck. He's just lost his money in Vegas, and in the process lost the chance to give his mother the funeral she deserves. Sydney takes John inside, buys him a cup of coffee, and offers to help him bury his mother and perhaps put his life back together -- by showing him how to play the casino system for everything it's worth. John, though skeptical, accepts the offer.
We skip over the next two years to get to the heart of the film. John and Sydney have become friends -- or, rather, family. John's missing both his parents, and it's obvious from the get-go that Sydney serves as a surrogate father to him. They're an appropriate match; John is an overgrown child, all puppy-dog eyes and naivete, while Sydney as played by Hall has a powerful, relaxed presence. Hall's an actor of impressive talents, and while his performance here is slightly uneven, he is perfectly cast; the lines in his face convey far more than those the script gives him. He hints at restraint and secret knowledge with every blink of his heavy eyelids, and he's a delight to watch. Reilly is also good here as the weak and gullible son; his lack of experience is written all over his well-intentioned face.
The only other two characters who matter are Gwyneth Paltrow's Clementine, John's slightly troubled love interest, and Samuel L. Jackson as Jimmy, John's disrespectful, irreverent, and slightly dangerous friend. Jackson and Hall are particularly good when onscreen together; Hall's old-school Mafia conservatism -- his deference to women, his dislike of anything loud or flashy -- contrasts vividly with Jackson's crass, upstartish muscleman with a gun.
The rest of the story really ought not be revealed; the film traffics in Sydney's secrets, and it's important to see it the first time without knowing where the plot is going. Suffice it to say that Sydney's relationship with John is more complex than is initially obvious.
I said the film covers the same ground as BOOGIE NIGHTS, and the films are nowhere closer than in their treatment of their morally ambiguous father figures, Sydney and BOOGIE NIGHTS' Jack Horner. Both serve as ersatz parents to otherwise lost young men, and both seem like strange choices for that role, with their seedy lifestyles and questionable morals. But Sydney is a more interesting and complex variation on this theme -- more fleshed-out than Horner. For while Horner doesn't see his own sins -- just his own impending obsolescence -- Sydney knows how many secrets he has, and needs to pretend to be much that he is not if he is to serve effectively as John's father. And that's a very interesting way of looking at fatherhood in general; for I suppose that many fathers must feel at times that they're playing a role they simply aren't cut out for. Fathers in stories (though not, I suppose, in the real world) always hide their weakness and their guilt from their children. Sydney does this, too, and goes to extraordinary lengths to keep John innocent of the knowledge of his new father's sins. It's not clear in the end if we're supposed to see this as noble or as base, and whether we should feel love or revulsion for Sydney. Perhaps both.
Taken as a whole, HARD EIGHT is far from perfect. There is much in both the film's conception and its execution that could have been handled more effectively, and everything from the lighting to the dialogue suffers from amateurism at times. But unlike many imperfect films, it has a number of perfect moments: Sydney sitting quietly at a casino table, chatting in a fatherly way with Clementine; Sydney drinking coffee, offering a young man a second chance at life; John and Clementine chatting nonsensically about rigging the pay-per-view system in the hotel, slowly falling in love. Anderson is simply superb at creating moments like these; I'm hoping that his ability to tie these moments together into whole movies will soon catch up.
(c) 1998 Chris Loar
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