The Gambler has a director’s name on it – a damn good director, as it happens – but really, like most movies these days, it was made by The Machine. The film was put together by skilled agents and casting directors (it has a cast that, on paper, at least, is out of this world), while the script got passed around among the top directors, after Scorsese spent time developing it with his Departed writer William Monahan. He jumped ship, and when the bottle finally stopped spinning, it pointed at Rupert Wyatt, helmsman of the excellent Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes.
All of which sounds pretty peachy, right? Stars all aligned, script polished to a gleaming sheen, everyone burning on all cylinders. Hitsville, here we come!
But no. We have Mark Wahlberg as an English Lit professor (I know, I know), by day teaching Shakespeare and Camus while by night he’s what Mr Joseph Pesci is fond of calling a “fuckin’ deeee-generate gambler”. With a rich mother (Jessica Lange) prepared to pay off his massive debts, he’s nonetheless in serious hock to a suavely lethal Korean gambler (Alvin Ing) and a crafty gangster (Michael K Williams in rare and delicious upbeat form). And instead of paying them off, he’d rather cast all of it on a single throw of the dice. He doesn’t care, as long as he can get that sweet, sweet rush of self-loathing when everything falls apart, no matter that these guys promise to kill him, his girl (Brie Larson) and his “entire bloodline” if he doesn’t wise up and pay up.
If you think you’ve heard this song before, you have: James Toback wrote it and Karel Reisz directed it back in 1974, and that 40-year difference tells you everything that is wrong with American cinema today. In the first place, there was the autobiographical underpinning of Toback’s own late 60s gambling habit. Then there was the wayward, threatening presence of James Caan in the Wahlberg role, who galvanised an already vertiginous and sulphurous plot, lending the character all the mysterious answers and insane rationales that Wahlberg is unable to supply. It was made with little oversight and that never happens now, ever. The remake has no rough and tumble, it’s too clean and symmetrical; no hair in the gate, no irrational or stunning developments and the music cues are glib and unearned. Caan’s character understood the deep-dish Dostoyevsky of The Gambler, who isn’t even mentioned here. Wahlberg’s bookshelves are heartbreakingly middlebrow – Galsworthy? Gore Vidal? Richard Ford? – and the movie suffers badly in its relocation from phantasmagoric 1970s NYC to present-day Los Angeles.
Someone – possibly everyone – thought this might all work but it just doesn’t. If you want a good James Toback remake, stick with The Beat That My Heart Skipped.
The Gambler is in cinemas nationwide from Fri 23 Jan
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