THE CARD COUNTER: Paul Schrader Unleashes on A 20-Year Losing Game

Paul Schrader has garnered attention over the past few years for his, shall we say, “entertaining” social media presence. This presence, limited in a very comical way to his Facebook timeline, is not unlike his screenwriting career. This is a man of many varied interests and when he gets to be curious about something, he goes full tilt into it. There isn’t a subject too unwieldy for him to reach out to the masses about. There isn’t a question for which he isn’t willing to bend the narrow frames of social etiquette to get an answer. For all intents and purposes, you can say that Paul Schrader shows every hand he has and leaves his cards all out on the table.

The Bluff

In his late screenwriting career, Paul Schrader has the patented senior citizen artist “f*** it” chips all-in attitude that takes his most visceral stuff from his younger days like Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985) and Taxi Driver (1976) and sharpens it further in its deliberateness. His latest film, The Card Counter, is very much a companion piece to his previous, First Reformed (2017). Much of Schrader’s oeuvre is the same story with different people and places, but this one hits nearly note-for-note the same sort of structural deception and existential crises of post-9/11 America as that film, replacing faith with gambling and environmental catastrophe with the Iraq War. But unlike First Reformed, the moral crisis at hand here is about the past rather than the future.

The Card Counter plays it coy by making its central character, who refers to himself as William Tell (Oscar Isaac), a card-sharp who understands that winning small hands by counting cards can land him just enough money to skate by, make a solid nest egg, and not piss off the casino owners. He has weird habits informed by mysterious demons like all of Schrader’s protagonists do – he wraps up all the furniture of his motel room (he insists on motels) in sheets and writes in a journal late at night with a neat glass of whiskey, mirroring Pastor Forman from First Reformed. But Tell’s story is not about what he does but what he did. He spent eight years in lock-up for war crimes in Abu Ghraib.

The River

Schrader flips what initially seems like a more brooding and cynical version of The Hustler (1961) or Pickpocket (1959), on its head in an earthshaking sequence depicting one of Tell’s PTSD-triggered nightmares. The camera swirls and distorts a prison hall in Iraq, where American soldiers torture Iraqi captives in disgusting ways many of us already know from the reports. The bottle-glass imagery makes the internal claustrophobia and surrealism of the prison that much more jarring and agonizing. Tell describes this experience and the sensations of sounds and smells to Curt (Ty Sheridan), a young man whose father was also there and who killed himself from the trauma (after inflicting years of violence and abuse on Curt and his mother). Curt is on the look for revenge, and perhaps a little in over his head, of one of Abu Ghraib’s chief commanders Major John Gordo (Willem Dafoe). Their journey together is one of constant unease.

After his nightmare, every somber and quiet moment that Tell spends at the card table seems to have a looming phantom about it. This becomes a film wherein Schrader tries to contend with the brutality and psychosis of America’s response to 9/11. Many people who try to reconcile with horrifying events of the past try to bury themselves in something new. Tell does so in poker. America did so in a hellish, genocidal forever-war. Tell is brilliantly portrayed with a simmering intensity that never gets too hot by Oscar Isaac. Tell’s partnership with a stable-runner named Linda (Tiffany Haddish) and his promise to help Curt pay for college allow him to build a slow sense of purpose in his life if only as fleeting distractions to the relentless guilt inside him. There are many different political positions that are offered metaphorically in this movie, possibly through Schrader’s research both in reading but also in his interactions on social media.

Linda is the movie’s most enigmatic character. Haddish plays her well, treading the line between mysteriousness and vulnerability. Tell mentions she “woke something” in him. While not explicitly mentioned, Schrader makes it clear that it’s a need to find purpose and it comes at a crossroads. She exists as two metaphors at opposing ends of morality – money and companionship. America, over its last two decades, has clearly chosen the former and the result has been an increasing sense of alienation among its populace. Curt on the other hand is the film’s most tragic individual, reflecting aptly the impressionable politics of America’s younger generations who are more keen and eager than those before them for revenge and reconciliation for the injustices of imperialism. The abuse he suffered under his father, a man who himself was living with irreparable damage at the hands of America, can reflect the suffering of a generation living through 20 years of a nation slowly crumbling.

Conclusion

It might be too early to say The Card Counter is the best Iraq War film to ever come out of Hollywood, but it does metaphorically reflect in all of its characters and Tell’s own hobby of poker, the ways in which the American populace has tried to deal with the effects of 9/11, a tragedy that this country still hasn’t psychologically recovered from. One of Tell’s rivals at the poker tournament is a young man with a posse who all dress in American flag gear and chant USA. Every poker player has a schtick and this guy’s is that he’s a capital P “Patriot”, and like most patriots, he’s never served in the military and, delivering the movie’s best political joke, he’s actually Ukrainian. He beats Tell multiple times and never gets what many audiences would want in a comeuppance. He’s Schrader’s way of saying that symbolism has become the winning ideology in America. That it drapes itself over everything and renders the feelings and truth of the last 20 years of this country’s tragic and unforgivable existence meaningless.

It’s perhaps deliberate of Schrader to release this movie the weekend of the 20^th anniversary of that tragedy then, to remind everyone what exactly it is that we’re dealing with. As we post flags and remembrances and argue with each other on social media, the idea that we’ll “Never Forget” 9/11 is rather a laughable one. We forgot a long time ago because the deaths of that tragedy never really mattered to the government or the general American populace who sought a psychotic bloodlust of revenge after it. And as the last two years pretty clearly prove beyond all doubt, death in this country still doesn’t really matter.

What are your thoughts on The Card Counter? Let us know in the comments below.

The Card Counter is currently playing in theaters across the U.S and will be released in theaters in the UK on November 5, 2021.

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