"What's the difference between a large cheese
pizza and a professional poker player? A large cheese pizza can feed a family
of four." —Five-time World Series Of Poker bracelet-winner Chris Ferguson
A thought: Has there been a more influential film
in the last 10 or 12 years than Rounders? The question sounds ridiculous on its
face, since there's nothing particularly groundbreaking about its neo-noir
trappings (familiar from other John Dahl films, like Red Rock West and The Last Seduction) or its story about the
powerful and sometimes destructive bonds of friendship. And yet how many movies
can claim to have lit the fuse on a multi-billion-dollar industry? There's been
some chicken-or-the-egg argument about how the "poker boom" started, but little
argument over when: The 2003 World Series Of Poker, when an accountant from
Tennessee by the magical name of Chris Moneymaker won first prize in the main
event, to the tune of $2.5 million. Unlike the poker legends who won the event
in the past—your Doyle Brunsons and Stu Ungars—Moneymaker was an
amateur, playing his first live poker tournament, after having qualified via a
$39 online satellite tournament. And with his doughy features and aw-shucks
demeanor in the face of improbable victory, Moneymaker sent a message to every
beer-swilling, hockey-shirt-donning, low-stakes home-game champion in the
country: With a few lucky turns of the cards, this could be you.
Moneymaker cited Rounders as a primary source of
inspiration—he even contributed to the DVD commentary track featuring the
Ferguson joke above—and it's a touchstone for everyone in the poker
world. Players are inspired by it in the same way hungry young brokers and
executives are inspired by Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, but without the irony.
Log onto any online poker site, and you'll find endless usernames and/or
avatars referencing Teddy KGB, the Russian mobster and card shark played by a
deliciously hammy John Malkovich, or "grinders," a term given to players who
doggedly scrape out a living in the game. (Side note to Internet poker players:
You always
want to sit at a table with someone with a Rounders-inspired name. They're
usually fish. Also, you'll want to get in a time machine and travel back about
four years, before the U.S. government cracked down on online gaming, back when
the poker boom was driving novice players and their bottomless credit-card
limits to the Internet by the tens of thousands. Good times, good times.)
Beyond the Rocky-like
inspirational finale, which pits a young comer against Malkovich's high-stakes
shark, Rounders
lets viewers lounge in the cool ambience of smoke-filled underground clubs and
insider lingo, and indulge in the fantasy of raking in monster pots and
bluffing the great Johnny Chan with rags. It's a recruitment film for would-be
degenerates.
Several films about the poker world have been made
recently, plus many more where a poker game figures prominently, but
authenticity is hard to come by. Even The Cincinnati Kid starring Steve McQueen,
once the gold standard of poker movies, ends with an utterly preposterous hand
where a full house, aces over tens, goes down to a straight flush. (The book Big
Deal: A Years As A Professional Poker Player, calculates the odds of these two hands
happening at once at over 300 billion to 1.) Just recently, the James Bond
redux Casino Royale featured a similar but even more ridiculous scenario where
four players face up to a $125 million pot with a flush, a full house, a higher
full house, and a straight flush. In both cases, the audience is supposed to be
awed by the high quality of play, but what they're actually witnessing is as
improbable as a Mega Millions lottery winner getting struck by lightning.
Twice.
By contrast, here's the first poker game in Rounders, where fresh-faced law
student Matt Damon stakes his entire $30,000 bankroll in a big hand against Malkovich:
The genius of the hand is that 1) it could happen,
and has happened to anyone who's played the game for any significant length of
time, and 2) it's a hand where a person could plausibly lose all his money. The
ins and outs have been a common discussion among poker players: Would it have
been possible to get away from it? (Probably not, most agree, but Phil Hellmuth
thinks that Damon's character could have limited the damage.) What do you think
of Malkovich's decision to cold-call the pre-flop raise with AA, which could
lead to potential disaster if his opponent flops two pair? How about Damon's
decision to overbet top two pair after the flop, counting on an aggressive
player like Malkovich to read his hand as weak? And how about when both of them
hit their full houses on the turn and check? For once, here's a poker movie
that understands—and, through superb use of voiceover narration,
communicates—how good players think through hands, and how such a simple
game can be bound up in complex psychology and stratagems. Conventional wisdom says
that a card game isn't exciting enough to be captivating onscreen, so the
solution is to highlight the money (like Casino Royale's nine-figure haul) and
divorce the game from reality. Rounders proves that it doesn't have to be that
dumbed-down.
After Damon loses everything on one hand, Rounders picks up nine months
later with him working graveyard shifts driving a delivery truck to pay for a
respectable law-school education. He's sworn off poker forever, at the
insistence of a girlfriend (Gretchen Mol) who could kindly be referred to as a
bit of a nag. (Or, less kindly, by the following expression: "In the poker game
of life, women are the rake.") When Damon reunites with his old buddy Worm
(Edward Norton), a card mechanic and con artist newly released from his latest
scam, the war for his soul is influenced by several different parties. Should
he stick to the straight-and-narrow, graduate with a law degree and a plum
clerkship, while settling down with the scold of his dreams? Or does he swear
off buttoned-down legitimacy and follow the uncertain path that destiny appears
to be laying out for him?
The chief catalyst for Damon's ascension (or
perhaps descent) back into poker is Norton, who doesn't like to play any game
straight-up when he can cheat his way to victory. Minutes before getting sprung
from jail, he delights at winning cigarettes off of inmates just for the sport
of it, no matter that he doesn't smoke. It isn't the payoff he's after, but the
sense of danger and superiority he feels in pulling a fast one on somebody; he
never passes up the opportunity to razz every low-level gangster and loan shark
he encounters, despite the threat to his personal safety. Norton knows how to
take people's money fair and square, just like Damon, but why suffer the swings
that even the best players have to withstand when you tilt the table in your
direction every time out? It's a short-sighted view: As Damon says via
voiceover: "You can shear a sheep many times, but you can only skin him once."
If Norton is the devil on Damon's shoulder, then
the angel is John Turturro, a grinder personified. Turturro hovers over Damon
like a guilty conscience, a constant reminder that he should play within the
limits of his abilities and his bankroll. The whole concept of taking a shot,
as Damon does against Malkovich with his "three stacks of high society," is
antithetical to Turturro, who plays cards with the dull practicality of a
factory worker clocking in. To his mind, the only prudent course is to seek out
the fish and reel them in; there's no point in sitting down with a table full
of high-stakes professionals, just for the chance of proving himself against
them. In this superb exchange, when Damon comes to him begging for some money
to relieve a debt, Turturro makes his case:
Writers David Levien and Brian Koppelman—who
would tackle poker again, with vastly diminished returns, on the short-lived
ESPN series Tilt—set
up a stark philosophical contrast between Norton and Turturro, yet manage to
split the difference. Damon cannily chooses Option C: Play the game straight
and never stake your entire bankroll, yet take a calculated risk when the
opportunity presents itself. It's a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too proposition,
and it speaks to the film's occasional lapses in purposefulness. Dahl is a superb
creator of atmosphere, but sometimes his slow-burning style comes at the
expense of dramatic urgency; it doesn't help that his lead character is by far
(and deliberately) the least dynamic and unformed, twisting on the influence of
several more colorful and persuasive voices. Yet there's something convincing
about the film's studied noir inflections, too: In the end, Damon embraces a
rogue's destiny, but Dahl and the screenwriters give him the space to give it
very thoughtful consideration. One of the reasons that poker players like Rounders so much is that it
legitimizes the notion that playing cards for a living isn't impulsive or
stupid, but "like any other job." And don't even try to call it gambling.
Nevertheless, the lure of competition and money
may ultimately be stronger in Rounders than the message to grind it out
prudently. Being a consistent winner in poker requires a lot of discipline, but
you'd be hard-pressed to find a player who doesn't thrill to the idea of
putting a blustery thug like Teddy KGB on tilt, or picking up on the most
blaringly obvious "tell" in poker history. (Malkovich's cartoonish performance
has caught a lot of ridicule, but he and his hammy Russian accent make a
five-course meal out of exclamations like "Nyet! Nyet!" and "Meesta
Son-of-beeech!") Rounders has a lot of sound wisdom to impart about the
game, from reading a table ("If you can't spot the sucker in the first
half-hour of playing, then you are the sucker") to the reality of big swings ("from
time to time, everyone goes bust") to the tacit collusion of strong players
preying on weak ones. ("It's like the Nature Channel: You don't see piranhas
eating each other, do you?") But it's likely the majority of poker newcomers
inspired by Rounders watched Damon stick Malkovich for five times his original
buy-in, and opened up their wallets in the hope of doing likewise. Cue the piranhas.
Coming Up:
Horror Month
Nov. 6: Near Dark
Nov. 13: Audition
Nov. 20: Pulse
Nov. 26: The Devil's Rejects