Movie: The Gambler (Karel Reisz, 1974)
Using university lectures to provide insight into your leading character's motivations and the film's broader themes is one of the oldest tricks in the book. It's especially beloved by the French and I always enjoy it, even if it can sometimes feel like blatantly cheap exposition, or is used to give the film an unearned veneer of intellectual heft. The Gambler contains two such scenes. In the first one Axel Freed (James Caan) makes a basketball analogy to explain why Dostoyevsky's assertion that "he deserves the sacred right to insist that 2+2 make 5" is a great expression of free will and embracing the possible over the rational. In the second one, he explains how a poem about George Washington makes a larger point about Americans being boringly risk-averse. In both scenes, the film errs on the side of cheap exposition, but James Caan turns them into something more.
Caan plays Axel as a genuinely great professor of English, who is not only able to explain classic literature to his students by providing interesting and original interpretations that connect to their daily lives, but also conveys how much these works mean to him. When Caan reads from the material he teaches, you can sense the joy he gets out of luxuriating in the words and meanings of his favorite authors, and in making his students get it. Axel gets two more monologues outside of class, one in honor of the 80th birthday of his grandfather, a rich furniture magnate, the other as a joke to playfully annoy his girlfriend. Both are wonderful feats of oratory, with Caan knowing exactly where to pause, where to put an inflection, which word to emphasise, how to create momentum, to make sure his story has maximum effect. That Caan gets all this exactly right is key for the film. It shows that Axel knows what he is doing, hat he is an intelligent, well-adjusted man who could have a happy and good life if he wasn't a compuslive gambler, and that his gambling addiction is not a consequence of external factors. It's what makes The Gambler a really good character drame.
I have referred on this blog a couple of times to the famous quote about how there is no such thing as an anti-war movie. Well, in the same vein it's also really hard to make an anti-gambling movie. I always greatly enjoy the colorful characters, the stylishly written bullshitting, and the allure with wich the casino's and gambling cities are presented. Combine that with some great location work (the shadier, the better) and wonderful performances and it's hard to go wrong. The Gambler mostly doesn't go wrong, and during the first hour or so, James Caan gives an immensely compelling performance. Unfortunately the film (knowing a little bit about him, this can probably be attributed to screenwriter James Toback) has some weird (socio-cultural) hang ups that eventually force Caan to act out some incredibly dumb situations, most notably the incident that incites his downward spiral and the ending scene. I imagine that one of the reasons for the 2014 remake is to present these scenes from a more enlightened perspective, but I am not in a rush to see it. If you want to make a modern version of this film your main actor should be Ben Affleck, not Mark Wahlberg.
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