Review: The Gambler (2014 film)

I wasn’t a big fan.

My biggest problem: I just don’t buy Wahlberg as a college professor. The classroom scenes feel like the classroom scene in a movie. They’re showy scenes that bear little relationship to what classrooms are like. Having such a big scene like that early in the film establishes that this isn’t reality, this is a movie. Which is not necessarily a problem. There are plenty of movies that operate well in a heightened not quite real world with heightened, stylized language. This isn’t such a movie, though.

While I may dislike Wahlberg’s character, the cast is one of the best things about the film. To watch Jessica Lange in the movie though is to watch a great actor playing a hard flinty character. I mean Lange is always fabulous and she sinks her teeth into a character, does not want sympathy from the audience, but by the end you can’t help but like her.

The flaw in the 1974 film – though admittedly it has been a number of years since I watched it – was that the central character played by James Caan had his problems and his underlying psychology was hinted at more than explained. This remake could have sought to explain and detail the causes behind his nature and the psychology of it. In a way that would be ultimately eye rolling and exhausting to watch. But that does seem to be the approach that so many films, and especially so many remakes, take to characters.

Instead the film took a different angle. Wahlberg plays a character who doesn’t exactly come together and make sense. Although one could say that about many of his characters - most of characters? - who tend to be more a collection of behaviors and some attitude than coherent human beings. (His characters aren’t even bags of bones, as the old saying about fictional character goes, but a few bones). In this film Wahlberg alternates between being a wordy drama queen and being silent and scowling.

And the fact that the character - and the film - go from one kind of scene to the other means that it’s even more important that the main character be a coherent character. To find a way to explain and show us how he is a character vibrating between extremes. And Wahlberg can’t do that.

It’s like the scenes between Wahlberg and Lange. She is the better actor. I mean, that’s not even a question. People who love Wahlberg should be able to go, obviously. What’s frustrating is that when watching the scenes between the two of them, my reaction shouldn’t be, Lange is such a great actor. My second thought, sure, but my first thought should be to see how the two of them interact. How we can see how they’re related, how he lives and acts in relation to her

The same could be said of Brie Larson who has a fairly thankless role as “the girl”. Sorry, “the student” that Wahlberg gets involved with. Because he’s playing a professor so of course he has to hook up with a female student. It’s predictable and exhausting. And I’m a big fan of Larson, have been for years, and she does a good job conveying the character’s introversion. She plays a lot of introverts, in a way that suggests that she is one as well. But as with so much, she’s able to nail certain scenes so well, but as written, the character doesn’t quite work. She’s able to add depth to the character, but in the end, you know what her character is going to do. Again, we’re not in real life, we’re in a movie. She sleeps with him, she sighs over his behavior, and the fact that there’s any more to the character is because Larson is talented.

I mentioned before about how Wahlberg’s performance and the writing of his character is so off. I do enjoy William Monahan’s writing (here and in other films). And watching John Goodman and Michael K. Williams’ characters and what they’re able to do with the language is fun. Again, the whole film could have consisted of heightened language that actors have to wrap their mouths around, but it doesn’t. And so this jerky tone of the language feels odd.

The film is good, but it can’t pull together. It is not a film about life, that finds that deep sting of existential despair. That pain of not measuring up. This male rage and anger that lacks direction or focus. The way that even an intellectual living in comfort who comes from money is not immune to such concerns.

Instead it just flounders around, playing with ideas and speeches, but it doesn’t believe any of them. It’s not committed to these ideas or a point of view. Because Wahlberg manages to pay off everyone, get off with his life intact, and then he runs across town to Larson’s character. And if I wasn’t already shaking my head and done with this movie, that ending made it clear.

Early in the film, in the “class” that Wahlberg “teaches”, he lectures the students about unhappiness, one of the students remarks how he drives a BMW and how can he be unhappy. And the people who made the movie and its lead actor seem to feel that way. He can’t really be unhappy in that state. People in that state can’t be really unhappy unless they make themselves unhappy, and they can make themselves happy as well. Which is such a bland and anondyne statement, but that’s all the movie has to offer, really.