The Card Counter (Paul Schrader, 2021)

[black&huge]

The film is equally lame.

This movie is the best thing he's done since Auto Focus.

[tolbs1010]

The film is equally lame.

This movie is the best thing he's done since Auto Focus.

For me, First Reformed is the best thing he has done since Auto Focus and one of his best ever.

[Persona]

I am very firmly in the camp that this movie ruled. At this point it's easily the best 2021 movie I have seen, though there's a lot I haven't caught yet.

Not as good as First Reformed, which is my favorite movie of the past decade, but it came closer than I could have hoped.

[knives]

After being agnostic to First Reformed I found this the powerful experience of cathartic lost identity. There’s something balancing about watching this man who works through the motions of expectation. It reminded me of Camus in a way. Though, the figure that stood out the most to me was Scorsese. Particularly how closely this plays to The Color of Money imbuing that film’s structure and character with meaning and purpose.

[therewillbeblus]

This revisit, I was struck by a few specific details of how loneliness drives behavior, not just the permeating trivial stuff, but some of the more significant moments.

SpoilerShow

In the motel-room ultimatum scene, Isaac's distracted rigidity reveals itself to be a thin and unstable coping mechanism when, despite knowing how 'not in control' he is, he attempts to force Sheridan to submit to his will, as if it will make Sheridan change into Isaac's version of a good life. And the irony, that this is not a life Isaac would ever permit himself to accept, coupled with Sheridan's own perceived brokenness not shining through to the only man who may just be capable of seeing it, played much more tragically this time around. Isaac leaves himself blind once he begins to feel for another person, because that leads to hope, 'tilting' quickly into a perceived urgency to sublimate all of his pain into a good deed. This is indeed good and moral - yet its immediacy and myopia stem from Isaac's loneliness and the bottled-up craving to make meaning. And yet that meaning, projected onto Sheridan, then becomes Sheridan's burden without Isaac realizing. The generational and basic interpersonal divides are too cemented by now, at least to each's skewed view from isolation and alienation's consequences of sorrow.

Earlier, when Isaac prompts Sheridan to share his "interests" in the car, and Sheridan quietly shuts down, you can feel the authenticity of that moment: When someone is trying to be kind and help, and it makes the other person feel infantilized and weak. It's all the more sobering when you recognize the pattern, that Sheridan's been trying to suppress those feelings just as Isaac is, the very vehicle thrusting himself as a role model on a kid just trying to make it by without having to be placed in front of a mirror to see that he's given up on himself; and vice versa with Sheridan's obliviously triggering provocation of Isaac's past. Each is vying for connection from the other and for a sense of collective meaning themselves, but cannot intervene appropriately or possibly be open to receiving the other's offerings. They are too self-protective and outwardly-focused to satisfy their own needs or the needs of the other, and the idea of a collective tool is too daunting for either to fully leave themselves vulnerable to embracing in practice.

And then the camera recoils in horror at the violent intimacy occurring in the next room, the film repulsed by its climax, for being the fate of intimacy's trajectory for all of these men and boys.