2 Pseudo-philosophically-charged-ramblings out of 4
I must admit that I rather enjoyed this film. For everything that it sets out to be, and for all of the effort that lead actor Mark Wahlberg puts into his performance, I was undeniably entertained throughout this movie’s relatively lean 111-minute runtime. In spite of my enjoyment, however, I often found myself struggling to answer the basic question of what the story was all about.
The critic, whose sole goal in writing is to produce a meaningful answer for “What is all about?” should never find themselves in a position where they are unable to answer that intrinsic question. With director Rupert Wyatt’s The Gambler, I found that it was more reasonable to take the film at face value than to attempt to decode subtext by applying a literary framework. This is a problem with Wyatt’s film: it is almost entirely lacking in subtext or subtlety. The story is spelled out within the first few minutes, and the remainder of the film is spent attempting to solve the plot’s basic conflict.
Jim Bennett owes $240,000 to a Korean gambling house. To pay off his debt, he takes on a separate $50,000 debt, and gambles it all away. To pay of his now $290,000 debt—plus interest—he goes to his mother. He then proceeds to gamble away what is presumably at least $300,000 in cash. He is a gambler, and Bennett gambles.
The Gambler is a film about Mark Wahlberg’s Jim Bennett—a writer-turned-professor-cum-gambler whose worldview is supposedly responsible for his stunning apathy and crippling addiction, or so the film repeatedly insists. In no few terms, the story, its characters, and even the film’s central conceit scream at the audience that Bennett is a man incapable of kicking his habit. However, this betrays a level of interest that is otherwise unavailable in Bennett’s character.
As Bennett ambles from one scene to the next, simultaneously winning and losing everything in a matter of brief instances, Wahlberg captures a man at a supposed crossroads in his life in a way that utterly lacks affect.
People in Bennett’s life are drawn to his apathetic charisma. He woos one of his students—played by Brie Larson—by throwing a tantrum during a lecture accusing his students of lacking genius. To Bennett, life is all-or-nothing; with no middle ground, his students are either literary giants or idiots. The film insists that Bennet is an extremist who lives life as a white-knuckle ride on the edge. The character is written more as a self-loathing nihilist bored with his life. To find meaning, or, more likely, to prove that his world view is correct, Bennett throws himself into situations where his failure is all but guaranteed. In short, he is a man obsessed with suicide.
Asking, “What does it all mean?” produces no meaningful answer, because the film’s basic premise exists as a conceit, not as a metaphysical call-to-action. The Gambler is not so much a film about a man obsessed with destroying his life, as much as it is a film about a gambler. In a sense, the film is more interesting than any of the characters written by William Monahan—the individual responsible for adapting the script of James Toback’s 1974 film for today’s contemporary audience.
On the film’s production: director Wyatt has a strong eye for hard-on-the nose symbolism and irony. In an early scene set in a bathtub, shortly after Bennett’s actions set off the film’s conflict, we see Wahlberg, in the fetal position, fully submerged under water. He emerges, dripping, and the scene invokes the same sense of rebirth as a baptism. In the next scene, we see Bennett throwing his life away yet again.
In spite of itself, the movie never truly does anything wrong. Instead, it simply doesn’t do enough. The Gambler is an undeniably entertaining film; it touches on introductory metaphysics in a curious manner, and while the story offers no real answers on the meaninglessness of life, it’s nice to see a movie try. Furthermore, Jon Brion and Theo Green’s score and musical selections aid in creating an ironic sense of atmosphere in a movie struggling with its own issues of identity.
Ultimately, The Gambler is a forgettable affair. Failing to produce any resonance with its audience, and failing to capture on the intensity of the 1974 original, Wyatt’s film is only truly categorized as yet another failed Wahlberg forray with “dramatic, serious acting.”