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Perhaps it’s a personal thing, having a
grandfather who was a professional gambler during the Depression, but few
occupations are as cinematically fascinating. Apparently I’m alone on
this, with Lucky You folding at the box office despite its relatively realistic
portrait of the game of poker and its players. Eric Bana is a
charming snake who plays the people in his life in the same way that he
approaches the game. He manipulates his girlfriend (Drew Barrymore) at will
and even raids her purse for gambling money while she sleeps. Lucky You isn’t quite
original enough to avoid the formulaic adversarial relationship with a
champion player, expertly personified by a taunting Robert Duvall as his
father, but it does sidestep the cliché ending. If all this reminds you of The Cincinnati Kid (1965), you
aren’t far off the mark, and Lucky You does not suffer in comparison. In fact, the fantasized
world of high-stakes poker in the Steve McQueen movie is brought down to
earth in the new film. The reputation of The
Cincinnati Kid rests more on the
charismatic presence of McQueen as the young hotshot ready to take on the
undisputed champ (Edward G. Robinson) than on its melodramatic story. It
looks good until its full hand is shown. Rounders (1998),
making three of a kind, transfers the formula to the underworld of illegal
gambling in New York. Matt Damon takes on a Russian mobster (John
Malkovich) to win enough money to help a friend (Edward Norton) who is in
debt to the mob. Malkovich’s flamboyant characterization is the only
standout element in this forgettable movie. The formula was nowhere in sight with a pair of films
released in 1974. The Gambler, an excessively somber film, features James Caan as a
gambler bent on self-destruction. Director Karel Reisz is content to assume
that is the underlying goal of all gamblers and fails to bring any depth to
his one-note analysis. Robert Altman’s freewheeling California Split is The Gambler’s
antithesis. Although the focus is on the gambler’s psyche here as
well, Altman splits it into two distinct personalities: the reckless clown
(Elliott Gould) and the addicted loser (George Segal). Altman avoids the
usual clichés by dispensing with plot entirely. Altman is clearly
more interested in the world these men inhabit than in the actual games,
and he wins with the best hand in poker.
New on DVD this Tuesday (May 22): Constellation, Fay Grim, Memory, and The Breed.
This article appears in May 10-16, 2007.
