THE CARD COUNTER: Paul Schrader's Unarrested American Decline
THE CARD COUNTER: Paul Schrader's Unarrested American Decline
The director stands as a lone cinematic voice willing to confront what it means to live with oneself in an era of pervasive decay administered from above.
No director today is making incisively reflective films on the present condition of American society with the regularity and purpose of Paul Schrader. While lesser filmmakers of his generation like Quentin Tarantino have entered a career twilight where all there is left to do is air petty, exasperated grievances (ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD), Schrader is working lean and mean on searing, pressing films that are equal parts character-focused and political.
Schrader insists on making films firmly in the present, evidently consumed with the sharpening sociopolitical instability in the United States following Donald Trump’s election in 2016. The synthesis of Schrader’s honest, non-judgemental approach to writing his characters and the political context of his recent work is producing crucial artistic meditations on what it means to live in an era of institutional decay.
Schrader’s 2021 film THE CARD COUNTER centres on William ‘Tell’ Tillich (Oscar Isaac), a former American soldier who once embraced the role of military “interrogator” at Abu Ghraib. During the Iraq War, American soldiers committed war crimes and human rights violations against detainees at Abu Ghraib and other blacksites, ranging from sexual crimes to torture and murder. No Bush or Obama Administration officials have ever faced consequences for the construction and maintenance of these systematic crimes.
Upon release from a near-decade in military prison in connection to these abuses, Tell has developed a finely tuned routine of drifting across America from casino-to-casino, table-to-table, playing cards to ‘pass the time’. This routine is disrupted when Tell crosses paths with Cirk (Tye Sheridan), a volatile young man who is resourceful if not slightly deranged. They meet when Tell can’t help but attend a seminar–‘Recent Developments in Interrogation and Truthfulness’–delivered by now-retired Major John Gordo (Willem Dafoe) who trained him in torture at Abu Ghraib.
Cirk’s father, also a torturer, had his life ruined by the same military higher ups that Gordo is drawn from. Grunts like Cirk’s father and Tell, we are told, took the fall for the masterminds when the abuses at Abu Ghraib became public. Tell notes ‘the only ones prosecuted were in the pictures’, a nod to the power of the image, the commodity form, and perhaps even the “open secret” of Harvey Weinstein’s extensive sexual predation in Schrader’s industry (which Schrader has not shied away from commenting on publicly). In the world of the film as in our world, the powerful, corrupt figures who manufacture crimes beyond denunciation largely escape punishment, with survivors of their institutions left to live with the ramifications.
In Cirk, Tell sees a chance for redemption should he be able to steer the young man away from violent revenge, and toward rebuilding his life (one with far more potential at this stage than Tell's own). To achieve this, Tell takes up an offer from a ‘stable’ runner named La Linda (Tiffany Haddish), raising the stakes on his poker career from his ‘modest goals’ to playing the professional circuit. Tell’s goal is to earn enough money to set Cirk up, absolving him of college loan debts, enabling him to reconcile with his estranged mother and return to higher education.
These are inspired casting choices. Oscar Isaac–who has spoken about the honour of playing one of Schrader’s iconic characters–seizes the opportunity in his most notable performance since the 2013 Coen brothers film, INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS. Isaac’s Tell is a man of rich interior and serious mystique. To synergise with Schrader’s direct-to-audience voiceovers, Isaac plays the part with restraint, affording a considerable and troubling allure to Tell. His facial expressions and body acting both encapsulate a line Tell utters when emphasising the eternal nature of torture: ‘the body remembers’. At any moment, you feel his ascetic, measured lifestyle may give way to a violent loss of control. The audience is never sure if Tell is conducting an intervention into Cirk’s life to keep him on the straight-and-narrow, or if he’s using the kid as a means to indulge his own revenge plot against the military man who made him an elite torturer.
Sheridan is an apt choice for Cirk, given he looks and convincingly embodies the thousands of real people his character represents, Americans who had their lives ruined by US militarism being turned inward when veterans return home. Sheridan performs Cirk with a raw anger that his character is confused by Tell seemingly not sharing, despite their mutual rationale. Haddish injects charm, humour and care into what is an otherwise dark, grey film. La Linda is played with line reads that some call stilted but generate buy-in from Isaac. Their romantic chemistry is palpable and comes to form the emotional core of the film.
Crucially, THE CARD COUNTER is the second of what is now a trilogy of films (FIRST REFORMED [2017], MASTER GARDENER [2022]) which unflinchingly confront the current poisonous American decline, utilising a number of consistent narrative elements. Having not yet seen MASTER GARDENER, I cannot provide a holistic view on Schrader’s American decay triptych. But from the point in time of THE CARD COUNTER’s release, Tell displaces Reverend Toller (Ethan Hawke) of FIRST REFORMED as the character who best embodies one such shared narrative element: the delicate tightrope between repression and release.
In each motel across his cyclical American casino journey, Tell meticulously wraps all the furniture in white cloth, effectively erasing his presence from the physical world in a kind of self-imposed purgatory. It’s a disturbing, fascinating idiosyncrasy that provides a basis for questioning whether or not these motel diary-writing scenes are real. They can be read as a perverse literalisation of how a man carrying such guilt can never sleep again, or may even desire to cease existing. Schrader has Tell himself reject the self-pity and liberal apologism pervasive in the cultural and media hagiography of the American war machine, declaring that ‘nothing can justify what we did’. Much like the ‘punishment’ of torture on a victim’s body, the guilty conscience can never forget moral wrongdoing of this scale.
The gambling element of the story is no cheap way to gin up tension, but works to reinforce Tell’s desire to not exist. He counts cards for 12 hours a day every day because it’s a way to ‘mechanise’ his existence–to be functionally unconscious and therefore not experience his tremendous guilt. It’s a movie with poker in it, not a movie about poker, but its inclusion also forms a comment on the Western myth of the open road and promise of reinvention. The reality is that gambling is a mirror to American capitalism: ‘OPM’ (Other People’s Money), moral and financial debt, the house never putting anything on the line and always taking a cut, faceless ‘backers’ and ‘stables’.
The aesthetically offensive casinos with their bright lights and ideologically incoherent tribal gaming licences are the lipstick on the pig. In an opening scene, an acquaintance Slippery Joe (Bobby C. King) asks ‘Washa Casino... where'd they get a name like that?’, with Tell answering ‘it’s Indigenous’, to be met with ‘where’s all the Indian shit then?’. We know the answer. When La Linda explains to Cirk that chips don’t represent large sums of real money, the house of cards patiently built from scene-to-scene comes crashing down. These casinos effectively serve as a prison on the outside for Tell: windowless, no clocks, regimens and numbers–with a great controlling overseer where a Warden might be. The manner in which the casino interiors and exteriors are shot, in addition to the various motels and American backchannels, imitates the same dichotomy in Tell.
Put simply, it’s a world of shit, and America, like the film’s main character, has debts that nobody can ever repay. These are transitional spaces where those on the margins of society move from transgression to transgression, forever accruing moral weight.
Just as THE CARD COUNTER builds on the thematic lineage of Schrader’s late career, it evolves the camera language that he and DP Alexander Dynan created for FIRST REFORMED. The 1.33:1 hemming of FIRST REFORMED’s aspect ratio blooms to 1.66:1 here, allowing for greater capture of the card table, without compromising an intense focus on character faces. Steadicam and dolly shots are mixed in at different moments, conveying themes and specific shifts within the characters. The card tables are captured matter of factly, impressing the monotony of low-stakes gambling.
In Tell’s nightmares, which transport him back into American military torture chambers, the cruelty is realised via ultra-wide VR lenses that create circular images, matching the circuits of guilt, violence, incarceration and gambling that constitute Tell’s life. The surrealistic imagery produced by these lenses contrasts starkly with the plainness of the casino settings. The circular images and ethereal distinctness of these sequences indicates that, just as Tell's crimes will always haunt him, the American state can never escape the profound moral stains of Abu Ghraib and the like. In fact, these crimes are bound to be repeated. The horrors of American imperialism will live on longer than you or I. The accomplishment of these sequences is to push the audience unwillingly into the deepest depths of hell–a warped space seemingly beyond this world, while in fact it is simply the worst of it.
One of Schrader’s best written scenes takes place in a diner named Chat N’ Chew, a location as disgusting as the name suggests. Dozens of dining tables with almost nothing separating them from one another parallels the huddled card tables of the casinos. In the past, these locations (diners, motels, casinos) were depicted in cinema, particularly Hollywood, to have a virility and exuberance. Now, the brown tables and chairs communicate the staleness of this society–it is past its use-by date.
In the scene, Tell and Cirk discuss three topics. The first is ‘the greatest hand of poker’ Tell has ever seen, showcasing his card-sharking talents and celebrating the iron will of going ‘all-in’. The second is an intensely uncomfortable recounting of the depravities he partook in within Abu Ghraib, which manages to be just as disturbing as bearing visual witness to his memories. Finally, they discuss Cirk’s murder revenge plot. An all-American conversation taking place in an all-American location, rendered in riveting fashion with a dolly push-in that illustrates the physical encoding of traumatic memories.
A key inflection point in the film comes when, as a sort of last ditch effort, Tell attempts to frighten Cirk into finally taking his advice, accepting his generosity and stopping his murderous pursuit of Gordo. By threatening Cirk with the very torture Tell and Cirk’s father inflicted on Iraqis, the grace of Tell’s intervention in Cirk’s life evaporates. Earlier in the film, Cirk reveals that his father’s dishonourable discharge from the military drove him into alcoholism and opioid addiction, turning him violent toward him and his mother. Tell’s capitulation to the threat of violence at once mirrors the refracted, shame-driven violence Cirk’s father previously subjected him to, and Tell’s subconscious notion that the strongest form of connection is forged through asymmetrical terror.
Cirk placates Tell, assuring him that he’ll follow through on their non-consensual bargain, only to react against the false discipline imposed by the threat of torture. Instead of going to reconnect with his mother, Cirk heads to Gordo’s private residence and attempts to murder him, which results in him being shot and killed by Gordo. The news of Cirk’s death initiates a revocation of the monastic discipline carefully cultivated by Tell over the years following his release from prison. Essentially, failing to divert Cirk from this fatal course drives Tell to give up his swelling poker winnings and complete the murder of Gordo, as Gordo not only steals his innocence by making him a torturer, he kills Tell’s chance at absolution.
Much has been made of the nakedly Bressonian final shot, which virtually wholesale mimics Bresson’s 1953 film PICKPOCKET. Less has been said about the implication made that, despite Tell’s inability to escape the cycles he is trapped within, this repeated punishment is both morally just and necessary for him to attain true forgiveness. For, if his cycle of incarceration did not repeat, Tell would have never forged his authentic relationship with La Linda. This relationship, absent from his life at the beginning of the film, is the only thing through which he can achieve a transformative expiation, made possible by virtue of being human: being forgiven–even loved–by another. It’s stirring and humane.
At the same time, the stasis of the final shot where Tell and La Linda’s hands remain suspended while attempting to reach one another, encapsulates the concrete political reality Schrader is excoriating. There is a conceivably permanent global “polycrisis” of capitalism, while in the United States, MAGA Fascism marches on. The false hope of authoritarian liberal decline management hangs over our society, epitomised by the Biden Administration. Together, we are suspended in austere, repressive nothingness. No one person, Schrader included, has all the answers for this collective condition, but the ending to THE CARD COUNTER posits that love and retribution may be equally essential.
Thanks again to my dear friend Reece Hooker for his editing.