The Card Counter: Paul Schrader smuggled the trauma of Abu Ghraib into a masterful gamer film.
20 years ago Paul Schrader told us in an interview that he would like to go back to his beginnings and write film reviews again. “I would love to do just that again. Unfortunately, you can’t be author and critic at the same time. But I think I could write wonderful reviews today. When I see a film today, I know exactly why they did it that way and not differently. A lot of critics can’t do that, they just guess. When I watch a film, I hear the conversations on the set, the conceptual reflections that were made.”
Luckily he didn’t. In his seventies he experienced the most creative phase in decades. It all started in 2017 with “First Reformed”, the masterful chamber play starring Ethan Hawke as a radicalized priest who lost his son in the Iraq war.
Martin Scorsese, whose “Taxi Driver” he wrote at a young age, assisted him as producer of another drama about crime and punishment, closely related to the first thematically. Nevertheless, it welcomes its audience disguised as something completely different. Schrader, who knows film history like no one else, first presents us with a classic game film.
In muffigen Provinzcasinos
Oscar Isaac stars in The Card Counter as hauntingly as young De Niro: a fallen war veteran and ex-convict who has made a new life for himself as a professional poker player. While he reveals a few tricks from the off that seem worthy of imitation, Schrader lightly quotes the genre of “The Cincinnati Kid” and Scorsese’s own “Casino”. But it’s not the dazzling neon palaces of Las Vegas that are his hunting grounds, but musty provincial casinos and seedy hotels. His real name is William Tillich, but he calls himself William Tell: his technique of counting the cards played gives him an unobtrusive superiority. But then the encounter with a young man breaks the familiar rituals.
On the sidelines of a poker event, he meets Cirk (Tye Sheridan) at a security conference in the same hotel. What unites them is their relationship to the orator played by William Dafoe: retired Major John Gordo was a commander at Abu Ghraib, where both Tillich and the stranger’s father served. While the major escaped unscathed and is now making good money as a private military adviser, the boy’s father committed suicide. Tillich himself spent years in prison and still feels unable to atone for the guilt he has incurred as a torturer.
Schrader, who has often brushed genre elements against the grain in his work, now lets his tragic hero take the boy under his wing. That would also be typical for a game film. But insidiously and increasingly oppressively, he unleashes the real theme of his drama, trauma and trauma transmission. The unequal friendship seems to have a positive effect, and it suddenly seems attractive to the player to leave his shadowy existence: a talent scout has cast an eye on him. But all the help he offers the young disoriented man does not release him from his revenge fantasies.
Which was quickly forgotten
Susan Sontag once wrote of “American surrealism” when she wrote about those non-places of everyday American culture that are so popular in photography. The shoddy poker rooms would qualify. The torture photos from Abu Ghraib, which Schrader contrasts with this reality in dream sequences, have also become part of American iconography. No major Hollywood film has faced this trauma so far, and Steven Spielberg would probably never get as far as Paul Schrader with this chamber play. He mercilessly tears aside the curtain over the quickly forgotten.
Perhaps the most terrifying thing about this American tragedy is that no one can rule out its repetition – in a different place, in a different torture prison. Anyone currently thinking about increasing defense spending needs to keep the bigger picture in mind. There will never be wars without war crimes, and that too is something that Paul Schrader outlines with few but pointed strokes: The structures that made these crimes possible are flourishing and thriving.
The Card Counter. USA 2021. Director: Paul Schrader. 111 mins
