Postmodern Cinema Approach: The Gamer
This is not really a review or evaluation of the movie as such, but rather a rough collection of scattered comments.
The news of first-time screenwriters writing specific scripts based on their own personal life experiences, and indeed miraculously actually seeing the movie being made and released, is always inspiring. The ones that always come to mind are Robert Mulligan with Summer of 42; Douglas Day Stewart with an officer and a gentleman; and James Toback with The Gambler. (Even Sylvester Stallone and Rocky can qualify here.) I say that they are inspiring because such news invariably implies something a little more than a simple desire to entertain or succeed in Hollywood: the screenwriter firmly believes in his message, they believe that the truth that they have to convey to us is so worthy of being discussed in artistic terms, that your desire to succeed will not be denied. In fact, there is a scene from the picture that we are mentioning very briefly here, Toback’s Player, in which the protagonist Axel Freed, professor of literature, gives a short lecture to his class on this very subject of will and desire. . .
Here’s an excerpt from an article Toback wrote for Deadline Hollywood. Give some background on how you came to write the script.
“After graduating from Harvard in 1966 I taught literature and writing in a radically new program at CCNY, whose additional professors included Joseph Heller, John Hawks, William Burroughs, Donald Barthelme, Adrienne Rich, Mark Mirsky, and Israel Horovitz. I also wrote articles and criticism for Don, Harpists, The times, The voice and other publications. Above all, he gambled, recklessly, obsessively, and secretly. It was a rich and exciting double life with heavy doses of sexual adventure to a large extent. Inspired by the life and work of my literary idol, Dostoyevsky, I embarked on the writing of The player originally intended as a novel. Halfway through, it became clear to me that I was watching and listening to the “novel” like a movie and suddenly decided to turn it into one. When I hit full speed I felt like I was a recording secretary, just writing down the dialogues and images that I heard and saw on paper as if they weren’t sounds and images at all, but rather real-life actions that exist. in my brain. “
So as we see, the movie started out as a powerful personal vision. British director Karel Reisz soon became involved in the project. Reisz, the author of one of the seminal texts on film editing, was a director of realistic films with a “focus on characters in the margins,” as his obituary in The Guardian puts it. The Gambler certainly qualifies there.
He was also quite unlucky in the way the executives he made the images for handled them once they were finished and ready. The Toback article cited above details this in regards to The Gambler; Steven Bach’s Final Cut, one of Hollywood’s truly classic insider stories, chronicles how Reisz’s next film, Who’ll Stop The Rain? it was sabotaged by the very studio it did it for! (By the way, the image was adapted from Robert Stone’s classic novel Dog Soldiers. Stone would go on to write the fabulous Hollywood novel Children of Light, and after reading Bach it’s easy to see why.)
The movie itself is a bit wonderful, and the article linked above is immensely helpful in understanding it and the overall sensitivity of the game. Lauren Hutton is an almost unreal presence on screen – why the hell was this woman no longer a star? In the title role, James Caan is excellent as an addicted gamer, but not very compelling as a college professor. Paul Sorvino plays a role that is something of a hybrid of the ones he played in Goodfellas and A Touch of Class. And in small roles we have many actors who would become quite recognized over the years: Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs, Burt Young, Vic Tayback, Antonio Fargas, James Woods. They are all very capable here.
The script, while powerful and obviously authentic, is not without its problems; For example, Axel’s girlfriend and mother both stood out for a while, at some point they just left the screen. They literally disappear. And Dostoevskian existentialism is highly questionable as a working philosophy, even taking into account that we understand that it is the main operating principle of the main character.
