User Reviews

Other then the bad acting from Tiffany Haddish and the terrible ending this was a fairly decent film. I just didn't understand why he called the police on himself. I thought he was going to kill Gordo then head back to the poker game and win it all. Didn't happen. He turns himself in and heads back to prison to spend the rest of his life behind bars. Stupid.

"The Card Counter" is a film by one of the great filmmakers of American social conscience. Paul Schrader has made a career of peering into the dark side of American culture. This film is one of his finest.

As a quiet character study, Schrader's razor-sharp camera lens focuses on the mild-mannered William Tell (a.k.a., William Tillich) interpreted brilliantly by actor Oscar Isaac. William spent eight-and-a-half years in the Leavenworth military penitentiary. It is eventually revealed that he was one of the patsies who was held up as an example for the commission of war atrocities at Abu Ghraib.

Through the relationship of William and his young friend, Cirk Baufort, it is clear that the low-level military staff were carrying out orders from superiors and decision-makers who were untouchable. Cirk identifies the toxicity not so much as the "bad apples," but rather the "bad barrel." A brief documentary film clip offers a glimpse of Donald Rumsfeld, plus voiceover narration of the strategy to "Gitmoize" black sites globally.

Cirk fantasizes about taking revenge on John Gordo (a.k.a., John Rogers), whom he blames for the death of his father, who worked alongside William at Abu Ghraib. During his time at Leavenworth, William studied the "Meditations" of the Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius, as well as perfecting his card counting. The phrase tattooed on William's back ("I trust my life to Providence") is the creed of the Stoics.

Some of the best scenes in the film are the poker matches in various casinos. William wants to win enough money to enable Cirk to pay off his student loans and bail out his mother, who is also in debt. He is assisted by one of the most dynamic characters in the film, La Linda, who serves as William's manager.

As good as William is able to "read" other poker players, his ability to understanding his young protégé is a dismal failure. Cirk takes the money and, instead of visiting his mother, pays a trip to the home of John Gordo, then botches his revenge plan and is killed. A self-destructive William then forgets the dispassionate stoicism that he has adopted and seeks revenge on Gordo himself.

The film has a strong allegorical subtext in which the story of William Tell is a metaphor for the horrors of Abu Ghraib. That experience serves as a coda to the failure of the American Century, a ghost still haunting a nation that bankrupted its financial hegemony and its democratic ideals in exchange for a superficial sense of revenge.

William Tell (Oscar Isaac) learned to count cards while spending 10 years in prison for abusing prisoners in Iraq. As a free man, he grinds out a day-to-day existence playing casino blackjack. He tries to win modestly to stay under the radar. La Linda (Tiffany Haddish) tries to recruit him to play poker for her. He is approached by Cirk (Tye Sheridan) who wants revenge against John Gordo (Willem Dafoe), the private contractor who led the enhanced interrogation program.

Playing blackjack don't always make for great poker players. He should have become an expert poker player while playing in prison. That would be a more direct connection. I like a lot of this movie. I love the actors especially Oscar Isaac's performance. I like the odd little touches like wrapping the furniture. I like the theme of guilt, justice, and reparation. There's a lot to like in all these parts but as a whole, the movie lacks intensity. The intensity isn't in playing poker. I get the connection of detecting lies in both poker and interrogation. The fact is that non of the gambling has any stakes. The stakes are all in Gordo. The movie skips Cirk with Gordo. Tell with Gordo happens off-screen. All the intensity is stripped out of those scenes. In a way, I appreciate what Paul Schrader is trying to do by deglamorizing those scenes but he still kept the scenes in the Iraqi prison. It's not like he's avoiding the subject matter. In that way, the intensity is held down. This movie moves along this dangerous path but does it without looking over the edge.

What a colossal disappointment this was. I can't even begin to describe the plot it was all over the place. It took an hour into the movie for anything to actually happen. He picks up this kid out of nowhere and basically wants to support him. Huh? He spends the whole movie telling him to "let it go" but then decides to kill the bad guy anyway and spend the rest of his life in prison after saying how horrible it was? A total waste of 2 hours of my life that I'll never get back.

This movie was written by the same writer who gave us such classics as "Taxi Driver", "American Gigolo", "Raging Bull", and others. So this movie has some of that sensibility.

Over the past several years I have become a big fan of Oscar Isaac, he is one of the best actors of his generation. Here he is William Tell. After spending 8 1/2 years in a military prison for war crimes he is now out and touring the gambling circuit. He had lots of time in prison developing card skills. He doesn't really want to be noticed, he likes to gamble, counting cards in Blackjack is one of his favorites, then take off once he has a few hundred in winnings.

He befriends a young man who lost his ex-military dad to suicide. It turns out William knew his dad, and knew the military leader who pushed them to their mistreatment of prisoners but was able to duck punishment. Only those whose faces were in the Abu Ghraib prison photos were punished.

Some of the middle of the movie gets a bit tedious with moving from place to place and gambling. But it all comes to a surprising head during the last approximate 30 minutes. Not everything is tied up neatly but overall it is a gripping character study.

Good movie, my wife and I watched it at home on DVD from our public library.

The Card Counter

William is an excellent gambler who gambles and wins small so as not to attract unwanted attention. He has also served time for being photographed mistreating prisoners at Abu Ghraib - Gordo, who taught them all the tricks of mistreatment, didn't get photographed and is now doing very nicely thank you. William encounters Cirk, a troubled young man whose father shot himself in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib debacle. Cirk wants revenge against Gordo. La Linda, who manages a stable of gamblers, extends an invitation to William.

Paul Schrader writes and directs this four hander (with extras) and I don't really know what to make of it. Tiffany Haddish is good as La Linda, but almost entirely superfluous. Willen Dafoe as Gordo is pivotal, but not in it much. Most of the meaningful content is between Oscar Isaac's taciturn, dead-eyed William and Tye Sheridan's closed-off and unsympathetic Cirk.

It's a slow burn. There's a lot of poker, but it's not a significant part of the drama. The final 10 minutes or so suddenly becomes gripping, but you may have lost interest before then. It held my interest. Just.

I would have given it an 8 but I have to balance out the lowball ratings from people who likely missed the subtleties in this movie. This is the first time I've done this btw, so please hear me out.

On the surface, it seems like a semi-typical rags to riches story where a man leaves his shameful destructive past behind and learns how to pick himself up again and create order from chaos. He starts mentoring a kid who he feels he can help, and starts a romantic relationship with someone who has also overcome a chaotic past and rebounded. Things are moving in the right direction.

But throughout this whole movie, you are time and time again lolled into a sense of security, of order, and routine, only for it to break - for example, a traumatic nightmare, reliving the past, and another poker player who defies order (the American) but still wins, and an admission that even himself "can tilt" at poker, as a torturer, and in life really. He hasn't really let anything go. He has done his time in prison and society has forgiven him but he says that "it feels the same when someone forgives you as it does when you forgive yourself, so why pretend otherwise?" Because he hasn't forgiven himself. There are too many analogies about life, forgiveness, relationships, revenge, etc, etc. It honestly requires 2-3 viewings probably. Even the way the melancholy music, both ragged and beautifully haunting, continues to play over actors lines without dimming, carrying Isaac along into the chaos of poker that he is trying to order, is almost reminding us that there is no escape from the inevitable conclusion that is hinted at earlier in the film. If there is order, it is in this.

Cheers!