The Gambler

STOP TEXTING IN THE THEATER, OR I’LL GUT EVERYTHING YOU LOVE!

Okay. Let’s talk about The Gambler.

Mark Wahlberg plays Jim Bennett in this remake of the 1974 movie by the same name.

Jim’s character, born with a silver spoon in his mouth, grows up to write a paper that regards a novel he read in high school. He wins an award and with it a scholarship, goes to college, and eventually becomes an English professor at a university.

Our movie starts here.

Jim hates his job, mostly because his students don’t honestly care about the subject matter.

A serious gambling addiction possesses Jim. He takes all his money to casinos and loses it, rides his chips until he loses every last one in some financial, masochistic form of self-punishment.

Then, he borrows money from gangsters so he can lose that, too, and get the crap beat out of him in some physical, masochistic form of self-punishment.

He borrows from one loan shark after another, until his family and even his loose associates receive threats from the mob.

We confront, here, the movie’s biggest turnoff (note that I didn’t say “problem”). Jim fails to make the audience sympathetic towards him. Heck, I found myself more sympathetic towards the mobsters who endure Jim’s runaround.

Here’s the thing, though. Jim couldn’t get into this sort of trouble in exactly this sort of way unless he exists as a complete jackass.

Reverse character engineering: ask not how your character would react in a situation, but ask what sort of character would create the desired situation.

We face a unique circumstance with The Gambler, in that it matters not whether we like Jim, and it matters not how Jim’s circumstance arose.

Jim’s situation proves symbolic enough to fit any audience member’s personal (present or past) situation.

We all, at some point, serve as slaves to one compulsion or another. We all know the discomfort of debt and the deadlines we face to fulfill them.

Jim’s situation exists as the sum of those compulsions and fears. We can, as audience members, experience Jim’s world vicariously and yet on personal level.

The Gambler deals heavily with compulsions not limited to those found at the blackjack table. John Goodman speaks at lengths about alcoholism. A watch dealer confesses that he cannot fight the urge to haggle.

The Gambler deals with debts. Not just gambling debts. Not just monetary debts. All debts, anything that one person can owe another, may it be the truth, an apology, or whatever else chains us to the floor and twists our guts because we can’t seem to cough up the goods.

Pardon the sexism, but men don’t feel like men when they owe, when they borrow, when they can’t pick up the check. I imagine women wouldn’t recommend it, either. We feel weak, small, and impotent. We feel like failure.

John Goodman’s character, a dangerous loan shark, will only loan Jim money if Jim says, “I am not a man.”

When one of Goodman’s gangsters picks Jim up to meet Goodman for the (presumably) first time, the gangster even calls himself Big and (lest that prove too subtle) tells Jim that he, the gangster, possess a large penis.

Until the final series of scenes—where, not coincidently, Jim can finally hold his head high—Goodman wears only a towel so that we can witness how much larger he sits than Jim. Goodman's character, in fact, sits in a car for this final scene, while Jim stands over him.

If the movie’s plot performs you no favors, its dialogue will likely win you over. It sounded Quentin Tarantino-good.

I can’t identify a single actress or actor in this film that didn’t execute an admirable job.

I feared, during one of the final scenes, that the movie would cock tease its audience (sorry for all the curses today, but QUIT TEXTING THROUGH THE WHOLE DAMN MOVIE, YOU PRICKS!!!!).

I thought that a certain scene with a roulette wheel would end with a black screen and credits before it resolved. I felt grateful that director, Rupert Wyatt, didn't follow that path to nowhere.

The Gambler makes one final point. You can, under only two conditions, tell the whole world to go screw itself:

1)   You possess a vast amount of money, or

2)   You possess nothing to lose and don’t care.

I publish my blogs as follows:

Mondays and Thursdays: Short stories at martinwolt.blogspot.com

Tuesdays: A look at the politics of the entertainment world at EntertainmentMicroscope.blogspot.com.

Wednesdays: An inside look at my novels (such as Daughters of Darkwana, which you can now find on Kindle) at Darkwana.blogspot.com

Fridays: Tips to improve your fiction at FictionFormula.blogspot.com

Sundays: Movie reviews at moviesmartinwolt.blogspot.com