WHEELER-DEALER
CROUPIER
Directed by Mike Hodges
Screenplay by Paul Mayersberg
With Clive Owen, Gina McKee
The Screen NR 89 min.
"I've a system that's fiendishly clever "That I learned from a croupier friend; "And I should go on winning forever, "But I do seem to lose in the end."
Candide (the musical)
Gambling is a loser's game. As seen through the cool, odds-calculating eyes of Jack (Clive Owen), a professional croupier and aspiring novelist, the punters who sit at the blackjack and roulette tables are sheep headed, sooner or later, for the shears.
Jack himself doesn't gamble. At least, not on cards or the spin of a wheel. But he's not immune to a little risk-taking in life. After all, he's a writer, and if a writer doesn't throw open the doors to chance and a little danger, there's not much to write about. Risks are the chips a writer buys to get in the game. The odds, of course, are as bad for a writer as for a gambler, as Jack observes, browsing in a bookstore where "books are piled like chips."
The movie opens with Jack being courted by an editor to write a novel, and it unfolds, with voice-over narration, in third-person chapter form once Jack reluctantly follows his father's urging and takes a job as a croupier in one of London's private gambling casinos. The book he undertakes is not the soccer novel he's discussed with the editor, but a dispassionate insider's take on the casino world. It's a world of strict rules routinely broken, of odds and chances, of personal loyalties and skin-saving expediency. And what is actually happening to Jack, and what is happening to his novel's protagonist Jake, is not always easy to distinguish.
Clive Owen, the 35-year-old actor who plays Jack, opens the door into star territory in his first role to successfully weather the Atlantic crossing. He has the chiseled intense elegance of a young Sean Connery. Tuxedoed, unflappable, with piercing eyes that miss nothing, he occupies "the still center of that spinning wheel of misfortune." Placing him there are another couple of veteran filmmakers. Paul Mayersberg (The Man Who Fell to Earth) builds his screenplay through character and detail before throwing in an unexpected twist at the end. Director Mike Hodges, whose first and best-know feature, the crime classic Get Carter (with Michael Caine), came out thirty years ago, directs with the sang-froid of a player counting cards.
Croupier is that refreshing anomaly, the sleeper hit that keeps the system honest. In the wild gamble that is the movies, it's reassuring to see that, if you play your cards right, it's not impossible to beat the odds.
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