HARD EIGHT
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1997 Scott Renshaw
(Samuel Goldwyn/Rysher) Starring: Philip Baker Hall, John C. Reilly, Gwyneth Paltrow, Samuel L. Jackson. Screenplay: Paul Thomas Anderson. Producers: Robert Jones and John Lyons. Director: Paul Thomas Anderson. MPAA Rating: R (profanity, violence, adult themes) Running Time: 101 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
I'll give this to Paul Thomas Anderson: he's got a sense of atmosphere. HARD EIGHT, Anderson's feature writing and directing debut, may be even more successful than LEAVING LAS VEGAS at making casinos look ugly, and his characters exchange dialogue as though every word had to be yanked out of them with pliers. That's the good news. The bad news is that HARD EIGHT is yet another frustrating independent film by a rookie film-maker who has an idea of what his film should be _like_ without having an idea of what it should be _about_. Though generally well-acted and interesting to look at, HARD EIGHT is more a collection of thematic ideas than a story.
HARD EIGHT opens with an encounter between two men at a roadside diner somewhere in the American West. John Finnegan (John C. Reilly) is down on his luck after a failed attempt to win the money for his mother's funeral playing blackjack; Sidney (Philip Baker Hall) is a solemn older man who seems interested in helping John out. A veteran gambler, Sidney offers to drive John to Las Vegas and teach him a few tricks of the trade. Though suspicious at first, John accepts Sidney's offer, and soon learns that his methods work. Two years later, the two are still friends and companions now working the casinos of Reno. There John gets involved with a young cocktail waitress named Clementine (Gwyneth Paltrow), an involvement which soon turns into trouble. As Sidney tries to help John out of his predicament, he finds himself in a predicament of his own when a man named Jimmy (Samuel L. Jackson) reveals that he knows some dark secrets from Sidney's past.
An extended sequence during the first half hour of HARD EIGHT might lead you to believe that the film is going to be a revelatory study of the gambling culture. On the evening of the day they first meet, Sidney teaches John how to fool a casino into believing he had gambled thousands of dollars, prompting offers of a free room and other perqs from the floor manager. It is an interesting lesson in deception -- as is a later instruction on how to steal pay-per-view movies which could send hotels all across America scrambling to cover themselves -- which gives HARD EIGHT a welcome sense of authenticity.
That sociological curiosity factor isn't enough to sustain a film, though, and sooner or later Anderson has to get down to the business of examining the relationships between these characters. At least he should have, but he never does. We see far too little of Sidney and John together to get a sense of their friendship, making the significant revelations to come ring totally false. Philip Baker Hall, the too-little-seen actor who was so masterful as Nixon in Robert Altman's 1984 SECRET HONOR, gives an impressive, controlled performance as the Weary Sidney, but Anderson doesn't seem to know what to do with him. We get a chance to see him in a variety of situations -- playing the big shot at a craps table, cleaning up after John's messes, showing kindness to waitress/hooker Clementine (a thanklessly unpleasant role for Paltrow) -- without really giving us a sense of who he is, as though Anderson thinks teasing us with a dark past is sufficient. It's not. Every once in a while, HARD EIGHT breaks out of its languid stupor long enough for some gratuitous violence, a half-hearted attempt at fooling the audience into thinking something is happening. Every time, it doesn't take long for the film to settle back into a bleak somnambulism.
The only time HARD EIGHT really wakes up is when Samuel L. Jackson turns up in two scenes, once to be crude and once to be nasty. Jackson's profanity-laced tirades are entertaining to a point, but it soon becomes clear that he's merely recycling riffs from PULP FICTION's Jules because there isn't anything here on which he can base a unique character. He's not really a character at all here; he's a plot device, someone who turns up when it's necessary for something to happen. A number of things happen in HARD EIGHT, but none of it adds up to a narrative we should care about. If Anderson is trying to tell a tragic tale of a man's misguided attempts at redemption, he doesn't succeed because he has forgotten to give us enough information about Sidney to make his fate matter. HARD EIGHT is evocative but thoroughly unsatisfying, a film in which an oppressive atmosphere of foreboding is the real central character, crushing the human characters like empty beer cans.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 fumbling dice: 4.
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