Rounders – poker and morality

Rounders (1998) directed by John Dalh stars Matt Damon as Mike McDermott, Edward Norton as Worm, John Turturro as Joey Knish, Famke Janssen (Petra), John Malkovich (Teddy KGB), Martin Landau (Abe Petrovsky), Gretchen Mol (Jo).

This is ostensibly a story about playing cards, but more than that it is a morality play, weirdly enough. It all starts with a huge big loss. Mike sits down to play with Teddy KGB and loses everything he owns in one fell swoop. He decides that he’s done, he’s getting out. That means forsaking his dream of winning the world series of poker. He is studying law at the same time and now he’s reduced to driving a delivery truck on the night shift to get by instead.

Mike is a likeable guy. He’s got a pretty girlfriend, Jo, and a judge who really likes him, Abe Petrovsky, and friends who wish him well. He has a set of principles when it comes to playing cards that imply he can beat pretty much anyone by skill and he thinks he is going to be a lawyer. All that gets thrown out the window when his old friend Worm (Edward Norton) gets out of prison.

The second Worm walks out the prison gates all bets are off. Worm is a mechanic, which means he cheats any way he can, including dealing from the bottom of the deck. Mike is adamant about not playing anymore, but Worm sucks him back into the game with hardly any effort at all.

See, here’s the thing – Mike actually has it all. He has a pretty girl, good friends, a good career ahead of him, he has a sponsor/mentor and he has a clear path cut out. All of this means he won’t play poker anymore, but that is the price he is going to have to pay. Slowly, but surely, all that gets torn down through the machinations of his best friend Worm, who is basically a manipulative loser at best. Worm has none of those thing and judging from the voiceover he never has had them.

The voiceover (Matt Damon) works seamlessly in this setting. You don’t even question it, which I think is in part because the whole movie has a forties Noir feel to it. The style and the theme is perfect for it, as well as the general feel of the whole movie.

But, here’s the thing – at the end of the movie Mike has lost his girl, his potential career, his best friend and his money. He’s been beaten and mauled. And all this is a win in his book because he has the money to get in at the ground level of the poker world series with a theoretical chance of winning a million dollars. He insists that poker is about skill, not luck. He believes it is what he was “meant to do” and the advice given to him in convoluted form by Judge Abe Petrovsky seems to second that notion.

There are a lot of good things about this movie, like the stylishness of it, which is economical and spare, and the cast, which is solid and stellar. Norton is excellent as the weasel Worm and Malkovich goes bananas with the Russian accent. Landau plays the old hand like the old hand he is and Turturro is so calm and laid back that you want to poke him with a cattle prod just to see him twitch. Matt Damon is very strong as the all American guy with a huge brain. There are no interesting female characters in this, neither the overly sexualised Petra (Famke Jenssen) or the bland Jo (Gretchen Mol) make any kind of difference.

It has faults to mar its strong points too. Worm is the catalyst for Mike when it comes to getting him back in the game, but Worm’s own storyline has a very unsatisfactory resolution, which is to say no resolution at all. And Mike sort of rides off into the sunset, which is fine and in keeping with the narrative, but it seems to say that no matter how bright your future might seem you still have to follow your … well, I don’t think “heart” is the right word.

This guy, Mike, chooses a life of instability and loneliness and may very well end up like one of those pathetic losers that populate a movie like Ironweed or Barfly, and still manages to make it sound like the perfect happy ending. So, it’s a murky morals movie. I’m starting to feel that should be a genre all it’s own.

Mule