The Long Game
“I've always been baffled by those who have transformed the most successful terrorist attack in history into an America the Great moment. It's the same thinking that transformed Jesus Christ into a capitalist.” — Paul Schrader, Facebook, September 11 at 5:07 PM
There’s one hefty reason why a permanent outage on Facebook would be mildly tragic: film aficionados worldwide would thereby miss out on Paul Schrader’s semi-incendiary posts (“I posted thoughts on the casual racism of my youth and elected to use the actual NXXXXX word instead of the socially acceptable "N-word..." and so on), his quick and dirty film reviews (“I can appreciate the inclination to give Clint Eastwood a pass but has an important American director made a film as bad as Cry Macho since Howard Hawks's Man's Favorite Sport?”), his caps-locked industry commentary (“THE OSCARS ARE BROKEN AND CAN NO LONGER CONTINUE IN THEIR PRESENT CONDITION”), and all those travel pics as the filmmaker darts across oceans in his newfound sobriety, assuring us that, indeed, it is possible to endure transatlantic flights without booze.
His latest movie, The Card Counter, a brooding portrait of a solitary anti-hero who considers himself to be beyond redemption, is peak Schrader in many respects. As in Taxi Driver (1976), which he scripted, Light Sleeper (1992), and First Reformed (2018), two later films in which Schrader’s directorial style hit a rigorous stride, the story centers on and is narrated by a reclusive loner wedded to an all-consuming job, a job ritualistically performed and, after a spasm of violence, transcended. Transcendence being the crucial term, as per Schrader’s 2019 essay “Rethinking Transcendental Style,” a new introduction to his seminal 1972 study Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer. As he rethinks it, Schrader describes the movement away from conventional narrative in films that favor duration and ambiguity, whereby form takes primacy over content. Schrader notes how directors can employ distancing devices to convey a disparity between people and their environment, ultimately creating an alternate reality. By heightening a story’s mundane ingredients, slowing the film’s pace, keeping the camera stationary, forswearing music cues, and reducing routine coverage, filmmakers can apply a transcendental style, building a sense of mystery and unease while reflecting contradictions in their protagonist’s psyche.
Schrader’s Tarkovsky Ring, delineating how certain directors compare after having freed themselves from “the nucleus (N) of narrative.”
In his essay, Schrader makes Deleuzian distinctions between a “movement-image” and a “time-image,” the former being common to linear storytelling, whereas time-images are anchored in slow, long takes, allowing viewers to absorb contradictory associations, to recognize visual and behavioral patterns, and to extract a sense of order from a world of chaos. Schrader’s films deliver suspenseful stories, often set in motion with energetic musical scores, but the conventional engines of action and empathy are offset by his deviations into more protracted and unresolved scenes signaling existential distress.
Schrader is highly aware of, and insistently vocal about, his Calvinist upbringing, his estrangement from his conservative parents, his subsequent conversion to a form of Episcopalianism, and the out-of-the-gate creative miracle of Taxi Driver, written as self-therapy when he was twenty-six, living in a car. He has also given us candid admissions of his suicidal thoughts, struggles with addiction, and his embattled stance as one of the most stalwart and versatile of contemporary independent auteurs. And while he has displayed a readiness to dive head-first into willfully nasty provocations (The Canyons, Dog Eat Dog), Schrader’s best films, by his own classification, float somewhere near the center of his “Tarkovsky ring” diagram, which assigns distinct labels to non-narrative aesthetic categories. More precisely, Schrader’s films sometimes align with “Surveillance Cam” captures of daily reality (Blue Collar, Hardcore) contrasted with hyper-stylized, theatrical “Art Gallery” fare (Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters) contrasted with the “Mandala” or meditative approach, adhering to a stripped-down style whereby action is slowed, drained or taking place off-camera. (Of course, hardly any commercial filmmakers can be classifiably non-narrative; and even the most abstract and fragmentary movies manifest some form of storytelling.)
William Tell teaching himself to count cards while in prison in The Card Counter.
Unlike his favored predecessors, Schrader only edges into transcendental style, stenciling motifs from Ozu, Bresson, and Dreyer, applying distinct lessons, even lifting whole scenes, while never going the full distance. That is, he largely adheres to a time-honored mode of psychological realism. On his last two features, working with cinematographer Alexander Dynan, he favors austere framing, gliding steadicam strolls, and a predominantly muted palette, sustaining an air of detachment while also expertly granting access to his characters’ unsteady minds, their repressed longing and rage, preparing for their inevitable acts of violence even as they aspire to spiritual release.
In The Card Counter, as with First Reformed, Schrader is invested in immanence, a heightened wait for divinity to emerge from the welter of mundane experience, a condition akin to a gambler’s stoic hunger for a missing ace. The movie’s protagonist is, indeed, a professional gambler, a man with prison in his recent past. Played by a smoldering Oscar Isaac, the character is named after, and set in existential dialogue with, Paul Tillich, the 20th century, anti-Nazi, German-American Christian existentialist philosopher and Lutheran Protestant theologian of loneliness and solitude. Released from prison, Schrader’s Tillich has renamed himself William Tell, a wry reference to a player’s change in demeanor that may reveal their hand. William Tell, as noted by other critics, is also based on a Swiss legend about a marksman who killed a tyrannical official who commanded him to shoot an apple off his son’s head.
Tillich/Tell, we soon learn via voice-over and flashback, was a special ops soldier at Abu Ghraib, and is still haunted by the grave horrors and torture tactics committed under the jurisdiction of a remorseless commanding officer, Major John Gordo (played with reliably gravel-voiced gusto by Schrader regular Willem Dafoe). The film's expressionistic, fisheye torture sequences mark a voyeuristic, almost videogame-like departure in the narrative, a gloss on the actual horror of Abu Ghraib, starkly baroque patches in Schrader’s otherwise even-tempered thriller. (The literal-minded “horrific”portrayal of torture can often undermine its power to cause anguish or outrage, as evidenced in Scott Z. Burns’s 2019 The Report — but that’s another story.)
Tell is undeniably — irredeemably — guilty, and he chooses to live out his post-prison existence as a recluse. While guilt can be weighed and punished legalistically, in increments, we are led to understand that Tell’s shame is permanent and vast — an archetypal embodiment of national culpability in the wake of misapplied lessons from 9/11. The muffled horror of these lessons gives the film, and Tell’s character, an almost crushing gravity. Unlike James Caan’s recklessly self-destructive Axel Freed in Karel Reisz’s The Gambler (1974), Tell is strategic, pensive, and measured, imposing strict limits on his betting and keeping to a monastic life. Yet his discipline reflects a kind of psychosis. As Tell shuttles from one mundane gambling emporium to another, he wraps his hotel room furniture with pallid sheets, simulating the uniform colorlessness and spartan cleanliness of his former prison environment, in contrast to the piss/shit/vomit/blood–smeared walls of Abu Ghraib. It’s in prison, Tell reveals, that he learned to count cards, to read books, and to incite additional punishment from volatile inmates.
William Tell’s fisheye flashback to Abu Ghraib in The Card Counter.
The film’s plot is shaped around the converging influence of two other characters: a gambling agent named La Linda (played with relaxed charm by Tiffany Haddish) and a lost young man named Cirk (a sulky Tye Sheridan) who becomes Tell’s rudderless protégé and surrogate son. La Linda brings flashes of humor, glamor, and optimism to Tell’s closed world. As in a good many Schrader projects, it is a woman’s tenderness that provides a firewall between damnation and absolution or, at least, acceptance. By making La Linda grounded, practical and mature, Schrader brings the character closer to Susan Sarandon’s tough drug mama from Light Sleeper rather than Amanda Seyfried’s dewy-eyed levitating kewpie doll in First Reformed. A sassy realist, La Linda is an optimizer of business and of pleasure. “Always looking for a good thoroughbred,” she says, though Tell (in masc-typical fashion) is slow to recognize she might provide him with an escape from his self-imprisonment.
The Card Counter is carpeted with a moody score by Robert Levon Been (of the band Black Rebel Motorcycle Club), impressively minimal at the start, though the music eventually ramps up and goes more than a little OTT toward the end, with lyrics thundering above the instrumentation — a far cry from the restraint of Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer. All the same, the story’s structure and essential narrative traction follow from a winning formula that Schrader has made his own, a wrestling match between the sacred and the profane dramatized through the plight of a haunted, withdrawn man whose occupation provides an overarching metaphor. Whether he’s a taxi driver, a male escort, a drug dealer, a priest or professional gambler, the solitary anti-hero interacts with a world of other lonely people who are also inherently desperate and lost. Eros and Thanatos are set within these dramas as twin poles awaiting the protagonist’s delivery, or deliverance, as a wave of violence carries him home.
The Card Counter returns Schrader to a more nakedly philosophical mode that also takes in political flashpoints, presenting a clash between Tell’s introspection and a sense of nationalistic extroversion channeled through an obnoxious, star-spangled, flag-wearing celebrity poker player, a man on a winning streak known only as Mr. U.S.A. (Alexander Babara), surrounded at all times by a rent-a-crowd of fellow patriot-fans. Perhaps not so incidentally, Mr. U.S.A. happens to be of Russian descent and has not “served” his country as Tell has. Though poised to be Tell’s nemesis, this rival gambler mainly acts as a red herring, a grotesque caricature of shameless national pride, unaware of the empire’s dirty decline, his triumph casting a cold light on Tell’s despair and, by extension, the world’s unconquerable rottenness.
William Tell in his sheet-wrapped hotel room in The Card Counter.
The psychological fallout of torture — for torturers as well as the people they torment — is at the center of this story, and Tell’s true struggle lies in his attempt to rescue Cirk from a life of bitterness and revenge. It may be worth noting that a similarly guilt-ridden, surrogate father-son bond is the engine powering Paul Thomas Anderson’s first feature, the gambling-centric Hard Eight (1996), and the parallel relationship in Schrader’s film can feel a bit forced; but without it Tell has little to propel him forward. In one of the film’s most compelling scenes, Schrader shows Tell employing torture tactics to coldly, abusively coerce his would-be protégé, using threats and bribes to conceal the guilt, empathy and love that Tell has kept hidden throughout the film. And The Card Counter’s inevitably violent climactic confrontation, satisfyingly off-camera, emerges from the masked sense of responsibility Tell feels for Cirk. Yet, unlike the soberly upbeat ending of Anderson’s film (and unlike Tell’s folk hero namesake), Tell is not able to save his surrogate son. And it should come as no surprise that a film shadowed by an unwinnable war arrives at its conclusion without a firm sense of victory or closure.
Schrader, after all, is bringing into focus the messy, anguished issue of American accountability, about which there can be no final word. Among a flurry of hot takes and blame-shifts occasioned by the Biden administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in August, foreign policy pundit Tom Nichols’s op-ed in The Atlantic, aggressively titled “Afghanistan is Your Fault,” takes the cake for bitter presumption:
In post-2001 America, it became fashionable to speak of “war weariness,” but citizens who were not in the military or part of a military family or community did not have to endure even minor inconveniences, much less shoulder major burdens such as a draft, a war tax, or resource shortages. The soldiers who served overseas in those first years of major operations soon felt forgotten. “America’s not at war” was a common refrain among the troops. “We’re at war. America’s at the mall.”
Nichols concedes that Biden was right to take the L and refuse to pass on the conflict to yet another president, quoting David Frum who provided The Atlantic with an equally smug piece endowed with the gift of hindsight. Frum writes: “Had the United States caught and killed Osama bin Laden in December 2001, the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan would have faded away almost immediately afterward. I cannot prove that. It’s only an opinion from my vantage point as one of President George W. Bush’s speechwriters in 2001 and 2002.”
William Tell’s “I Trust My Life to Providence / I Trust My Soul to Grace” tattoo in The Card Counter.
“Vantage point” carries an acrid taste here, since Frum played a pivotal role inventing the “Axis of Evil” PR campaign that birthed the succession of forever wars on terror, unleashing military operations across Iraq and elsewhere, destroying hundreds of thousands of lives, squandering trillions of dollars. In the thick of the accountability debate, Nichols and Frum are larping as bystanders, pointing fingers everywhere but at themselves, seldom relating these wars to the Afghan people, for whom this too shall not pass.
So where, when the torturer's grief is granted more attention than the tortured inmates, when all the costs are tallied and all the cards counted, do fingers ultimately point in Schrader’s film? Circle back to this paragraph after you’ve seen the movie, if you’re particularly prickly about spoilers, but I’d be remiss not to address the borderline cheesy final freeze-frame, in which Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam and Spielberg’s E.T. converge to cap Schrader’s fourth or fifth recursive ending, a replay from Bresson’s Pickpocket, showing the touch of two soulmates framed and obstructed by a prison booth window — a gesture of spiritual transmission, with La Linda’s lavish acrylic fingernail adding an extra spark of conductivity. William Tell is Everyman, a forsaken sinner opening his heart to Christ our savior: an immaculately dressed, beautiful black woman.
As the credits roll, with music at full blast, we are confronted with Schrader’s bracing mix of minimalism and excess, cool stylization building to a bid for volcanic feeling. A variation on a theme, this is both delightful and disappointing, because the theme relates to the ineffable, a yearning for spiritual elevation that is poured into a prefabricated receptacle. This fantasy — a self-flagellating avenger with blood on his hands received by a compassionate female witness — speaks to our current confusion and need. As America withdraws from Afghanistan, Schrader presents us with a parable about the perils of vengeance and collective complacency, while underscoring the aching fact that absolution, in war or peace, is never absolute.
The Creation of Adam-cum-E.T. moment at The Card Counter’s conclusion.
