‘Ballad of a Small Player’ Review: A Hollow Portrait of Redemption

Edward Berger’s Ballad of a Small Participant is a fevered, neon-drenched movie about a man on the run from his crimes and himself, and it desires to concurrently revel within the glamor of high-end playing and critique the endless gluttony that fuels it. This isn’t an uncommon tack for Berger, as his All Quiet on the Western Entrance has a equally confused relationship to the economic violence that it lasciviously depicts. However this movie, tailored by Rowan Joffe from Lawrence Osborne’s 2014 novel of the identical title, is all in regards to the doable non secular redemption of spiraling gambler Lord Doyle (Colin Farrell), and its ambivalent perspective on the greed and glitz of his world makes it tough to speculate a lot care in what occurs to him.

The movie opens on Doyle crashed out in a trashed Macau on line casino suite that appears like the location of a battle between the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin at their debauched peaks. Like every little thing we’re proven about Doyle, the setting is cheesy but extravagant, worlds away from the grubby bottom-feeding of a die-hard self-destructor like Nicolas Cage’s Ben in Leaving Las Vegas.

Doyle’s self-consciously doom-laden narration (“I’m a excessive curler on a slippery slope”) clues us in to his predicament, as does the frenetic visuals, all rushing monitoring pictures, distorted zooms, and candy-colored backdrops. The issue for the movie is that, gymnastic digital camera actions and lusciously palatial on line casino settings apart, Doyle’s scenario is extremely, repetitively, painfully banal: He’s broke, owes too many individuals an excessive amount of cash, and is operating out of choices.

At first, Berger performs this for darkish laughs. The sweaty, pop-eyed Doyle is a ridiculous con man who wears “fortunate” yellow gloves and doesn’t understand everybody can see him coming a mile away. These early scenes present Farrell at his greatest, bringing a comedically zesty desperation to scenes of Doyle making an attempt to duck these seeking to settle his room invoice (about $45,000 thus far), getting taken to the cleaners on the baccarat desk by veteran card sharp Grandma (Deanie Ip), and getting double-crossed by fellow expat Adrian (Alex Jennings). By the point Doyle is hunted down by a prim non-public investigator (Tilda Swinton) seeking to get well the fortune he swindled from an previous girl and gambled away, he appears filter out of choices and about to crack.

However the script turns too quickly towards Doyle’s redemption. His sudden curiosity in strolling on the trail towards self-discovery might need felt extra plausible had it not hinged on the contrived look of a lovely fixer and mortgage shark, Dao Ming (Fala Chen), who, after rebuffing his whining requests for a stake to win his a refund, gives him with a sympathetic ear and place to crash. She’s much less a character than an assortment of unique clichés, as evidenced by her gently explaining to Doyle the that means of the Competition of the Hungry Ghosts—the place the lifeless are honored partly by the burning of paper cash, a too-on-the-nose visible illustration of our protagonist’s quandary—and a scene through which they smoke opium.

Berger’s hyperbolic course and utilization of densely layered, colourful backgrounds makes for a visible feast. He’s enamored by flashy surfaces and displaying individuals navigate labyrinths—WWI trenches, Vatican corridors, on line casino flooring—at frantic pace. However not like All Quiet on the Western Entrance and Conclave, Ballad of a Small Participant stays largely on the floor, by no means digging into or critiquing the nuts and bolts of the system—high-end playing on this occasion—that its hero has each gamed and been entrapped by. As a end result, we’re left to merely observe Doyle as he hits one all-time low after one other till he rallies for one large final playing spree to win every little thing again, Rocky-style. And a large drawback with that’s that there’s not a lot one can do to make baccarat practically as enthralling because the filmmakers appear to think about it to be.