Rounders (1998)

reviewed by
Brian Takeshita


ROUNDERS
A Film Review by Brian Takeshita
Rating:  *** out of ****

Ever wonder what happened to Gabe Kaplan? You remember, he was the title character in that 70's sitcom, "Welcome Back Kotter." Always trying to help out the Sweathogs, frequently trying to dodge Mr. Woodman, ever wary of his wife's tuna casserole. "So," you ask, "where is he now?" Mr. Kaplan actually spends much of his time these days playing professional high-stakes poker. That's right. I'm not sure if it's his main source of income, but from what I've heard, the guy occasionally comes away with $20,000 at a time. And there you were, thinking I was going to tell you he was doing off-Broadway theater. You silly goose.

Well, Gabe Kaplan isn't in the movie ROUNDERS, nor is the film about the actor come gambler's life. But ROUNDERS is about poker, and Gabe plays poker, and I thought that was kind of a neat connection. Sorry about the segue, or lack thereof.

Matt Damon plays Mike McDermott, a law student who also has a singular talent for the game of poker. He's been playing for a while, and more than being proficient, he has caught the bug. He goes to all the underground games in New York City, knows the regulars, and knows how to win. In the beginning of the film, he's built up a nice thirty grand nest egg, which he takes to the speakeasy-type gaming parlor where the big boys play. Mike is there to make his bid into the upper echelon by staking it all against Teddy KGB (John Malkovich), an Oreo-munching cardshark with ties to the Russian Mafia. Mike has the potential to take a large pot and go to Vegas and buy into the World Series of Poker, but instead he loses it all in a single hand. Months later, he's paying his way through law school by driving a delivery truck.

When Mike's best friend and poker buddy Worm (Edward Norton) finishes his jail term for hustling some students, he wants to pick up right were they left off, working as a team to part others with their betting cash. Although Mike has stopped playing cards as a promise to his girlfriend and fellow law student, Jo (Gretchen Mol), Worm connives Mike into playing once more, and Mike, bitten again by the bug, slides down that slippery slope, risking his relationship, education, and reputation as playing poker again becomes the focus of his life.

To make a film about gambling, a filmmaker will usually have to play up the glamorous side to get the audience behind the characters. This is because few moviegoers will care a whole lot about some guy in a leisure suit or terry cloth shirt sitting at a folding card table with a stogie in his mouth. ROUNDERS, however, seems to go more for the latter than the former. The card clubs Mike and Worm frequent aren't very glamorous at all. There's a basement, a lodge with elk heads on the wall, a goulash joint - these are the kinds of locales in which director John Dahl sets his shots. Except for one brief instance when the two players visit Atlantic City, the film is bereft of the flashing lights of the casinos or the pleasant color of the green felt table. The reason ROUNDERS still captures our attention is because it is less about the game of poker than it is about the personalities which enjoy and are slaves to it.

We're given a nice set of interesting characters with clear motivations, and good actors to play them. Matt Damon is very natural as Mike, who struggles between his desire to play the straight and narrow by finishing law school, and answering what may be his true calling, playing professional poker. Ed Norton's Worm is truly a worm, always looking for the angle and playing everyone for what they're worth. John Turturro, who amazes me with his acting range, tones it down in this film by playing Joey Knish, a virtual poker prodigy in his time who now plays the underground games to make rent and child support payments. He's both a friend and mentor to Mike, and Turturro's low-key performance is totally convincing, just as John Malkovich's heavily-accented Teddy KGB is imposing as an adversarial dragon Mike must slay to prove himself.

Martin Landau is also thrown into the mix as one of Mike's law professors, Abe Petrovsky. While Landau slips well into the role, his character, spitting out personal anecdotes about staying true to one's self, facilitates the channeling of the storyline toward a predictable ending. Perhaps the weak link in the otherwise formidable line-up of acting talent, however, is Gretchen Mol who just didn't seem to have much presence on screen. She's a genuine peach to look at, kind of a cross between actress Renee Zellweger and singer Jewel (and I wouldn't be surprised if the three of them formed some kind of blond-haired triumvirate and attempted to take over the world), but her delivered lines seemed very flat, and I found myself looking for Matt Damon's reactions instead.

A good thing about ROUNDERS is that it doesn't get bogged down in the character development and statement making so much that it can't find time for humor. The film is peppered nicely with scenes that both make you laugh and keep the pacing going, such as a sequence where Mike and Worm move rapidly around New York from one game to the next, in widely different locales. One game in a cigar club had me in stitches. "I LOVE the sweetness of this dark maduro wrapper," says one of the players, clearly more interested in displaying his pretentiousness over the cigar in one hand than in the cards in his other. I was hoping Mike and Worm would really take these guys.

With all the poker being played, ROUNDERS had the potential to be very confusing. You might think you know a lot about poker, but think again. Luckily, we're given a narration by Damon during the more intricate moments to explain what's going on. The narrations are more informative than intrusive, and apprise us of what the stakes are and why certain players want to do the things they do. It's nice that as the characters develop, so does our comprehension of their world.

As a film about success and survival in the realm of underground poker, ROUNDERS delivers in spades. Wait! As a film about the culture of cards, ROUNDERS is an ace. Hang on! Packed with great acting and great characters, ROUNDERS is a full house. Okay, I guess that's enough.

Oh, by the way, if you ever want to get into a game with ol' Gabe Kaplan, be sure to bring a note from Epstein's mother.

Review posted September 17, 1998

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