Spoiler Review: 'The Card Counter' Starring Oscar Isaac

The Card Counter is among the most frustrating movies I have ever seen. The film stars Oscar Isaac as a professional gambler with a talent for counting cards. It’s a talent that he developed while in prison. While biding his time until release, he taught himself how to count cards and he uses that talent at casinos across the country.He’s smart about this talent, he never goes for big money, and he knows exactly when to walk away from the table to collect his winnings.

Oscar Isaac’s character is named William Tell, get it, Tell, he’s a gambler, his name is Tell? Get it? William Tell is also the name of a famed Swiss folk hero who legend says, shot an apple off of a boy’s head with a bow and arrow, he was a legendary marksman. The Swiss folk hero legend has nothing to do with The Card Counter, and the character name, William Tell may also be an alias and thus has no meaning other than being unnecessarily distracting.

William’s life takes a turn when, while gambling in Atlantic City he sees a familiar name taking part in a convention at the hotel. Major John Gordo (Willem Dafoe) plays a prominent role in the past of William Tell. Major Gordo is part of the reason why we met William while he was in jail, specifically the military prison at Leavenworth, Kansas. We will soon learn that William was a guard at Abu Ghraib and participated in the torture of prisoners there. Major Gordo was his commanding officer at Abu Ghraib and after escaping any blame or punishment for what happened there, the Major became a millionaire overseeing a mercenary for hire company.

While he avoids actually meeting Gordo again at the convention, William does meet a young man named Cirk with a C, played by Tye Sheridan. Director Paul Schrader apparently believed the spelling of Cirk’s name, it begins with a C instead of the more common K, that characters repeat this fact for inexplicable reasons. Cirk is the son of a man who was also a guard at Abu Ghraib, a man who also went to prison, and who may or may not have taken his own life over the guilt over what occurred at Abu Ghraib.

Cirk has a plot to take revenge on Major Gordo and, recognizing William as someone who served with his father and suffered the consequences of Gordo’s leadership, Cirk hopes to convince William to join his plot. William does not want anything to do with this revenge scheme but he does feel sorry for Cirk so he decides to take the kid under his wing. After accepting an offer from La Linda (Tiffany Haddish) to stake him in a series of high profile, big money, poker games, William plans to make money and give it to Cirk in hope of getting the kid to swear off his revenge plan. Meanwhile, William begins to fall for La Linda, thus complicating their business relationship.

Somewhere within the morass of The Card Counter is a very good movie. Director Paul Schrader is a legend who has had his hand in numerous classic movies, most recently his devastating drama, First Reformed. Schrader’s immense talent and reputation are a big part of what makes The Card Counter such a crushing disappointment. It’s easy to see where the good elements of The Card Counter are, the elements that could make it legendary. Unfortunately, those moments are lost when the director gives into distraction and layers in unnecessary scenes that distract from what should be a very compelling character study.

I’m going to venture into some specific points about what is so frustrating about The Card Counter and that will include some spoilers so if you still want to see The Card Counter, take the off-ramp now. I am not recommending The Card Counter but Oscar Isaac is very good in this otherwise not great movie and if you are a fan, I would actually recommend you see The Card Counter and just try to enjoy Isaac’s presence and ignore the messy business holding it back.

With that, let’s get into the many specific problems of The Card Counter.

Why is Willem Dafoe in this movie? I am, as most right thinking people are, a huge admirer of Willem Dafoe. Mr Dafoe elevates every movie he appears in with his talent and charisma. That said, his presence is strangely employed in The Card Counter. Dafoe’s Major Gordo is the villain of the movie but he has so little screen time that you never really get a good sense of the man, the kind that would make the character relevant and compelling in the narrative. Dafoe does what he can in limited scenes, but the character is far too thin and his fate is too obvious, even as his death is conducted entirely off screen.

Among several curious and unnecessary elements of The Card Counter is a predilection that Issac’s William has for staying in cheap hotels and covering the interior of the hotel in sheets that he brings with him everywhere. Schrader spends time on this curious detail about William. The director spends several minutes on William in close ups and mid shots showing him meticulously covering every inch of the hotel in these bright white sheets.

The focus on these sheets and the meticulous nature of how William uses them to cover the bed, the television, the desk and even the light fixtures with these sheets should be a visual indication of… something. The movie camera is biased and what a director chooses to focus on in any moment in a finished movie is implicated in the bias of the camera. By being featured, by being central to an aspect of the main character, these sheets are important and because of the very unique and curious way these sheets are used, they require an explanation.

Require isn’t the right word. To be more accurate, the sheets and the focus on the sheets needs to be justified in some way. Even if we never get a complete visual or dialogue explanation for the sheets, they must serve a purpose that is, at least vaguely discernible for the audience. Otherwise, the focus on the sheets and their meticulous application are a distracting detail, purposeless and pulling focus and time away from whatever theme the movie is getting at.

My podcast partner on the Everyone’s a Critic Movie Review Podcast, Bob Zerull, who was also disappointed in The Card Counter, was searching for some reason for the sheets and offered that they were a symbol of the character of William. The application and meticulous nature of the use of the sheets indicates that William is thorough and patient. I don’t disagree but this quirk is better demonstrated in the scenes where William is talking about his approach to counting cards and his approach to torture and interrogation at Abu Ghraib.

It leads me to wonder if by some bizarre leap of ill-logic did Paul Schrader not think that Oscar Isaac was a good enough actor to demonstrate these traits through his performance? I cannot imagine that is the reason, Isaac is electric in the scenes where Schrader lets him do the work. Even in the sheet application scene, Isaac’s face does a great deal, his smoldering intensity unfortunately serves to underline how important the sheets should be but are not. I’ve been talking about sheets for too long but I can’t let it go. It's Chekhov’s sheets, the detail of the sheets is so thoroughly established and re-occurring that they MUST be justified and they are not.

There are other strange misfires throughout The Card Counter. As William and Cirk are traveling the road together on William’s gambling tour, WIlliam insists that they go to Leavenworth Prison and meet with a former friend of his who is still incarcerated. Cirk refuses. William insists and they drive to Leavenworth. William parks the car and further insists that they need to go in and visit his friend. Cirk refuses and William goes in without him.

We do not go inside and we never meet William’s friend and we are left baffled as to what the point of this scene was. I can infer that William was trying to scare Cirk out of his revenge plan by showing him what prison is like and where he could end up if he kills Major Gordo, but that inference is entirely my own. The scene is so poorly implied and carried out that it comes off as a meaningless diversion from the story.

Next on our list, he romance between William and La Linda which falls completely flat. In their initial meeting, William dismisses her offer to stake him and her invitation to join her stable of gamblers. Then, after meeting Cirk, he takes her offer out of necessity in order to fulfill what he hopes will be a plan to stop Cirk from trying to kill Gordo by paying him off. Throughout their encounters, the interactions between William and La Linda are perfunctory until Schrader seems to arrive at the idea that they should get romantically involved. It plays as if Schrader thought because one is a man and the other is a woman that they automatically had to be a couple regardless of how dry and and indifferent their previous scenes together have been to this point.

Credit to Oscar Isaac and Tiffany Haddish, they try to spark some chemistry but they are thoroughly defeated by Schrader’s obtuse direction which keeps most of the development of their relationship covered in montages of hotels and dimly lit poker palaces. Schrader is far more interested in the dynamics of William’s relationship with Cirk and La Linda disappears for stretches and has no involvement with or information about the other plot, William’s connection to Abu Ghraib.

Finally we reach the ending of The Card Counter which proves that even great filmmakers and screenwriters are not immune to using cliches. In the final act of The Card Counter, Oscar Isaac’s William learns that Tye Sheridan’s Cirk has been killed by Major Gordo after Cirk had attacked the Major outside the Major’s home in Washington D.C. William hears of Cirk’s death and Gordo’s heroic survival of this assassination attempt via exposition newscast. Even someone as esteemed as Paul Schrader can’t resist an exposition dump newscast.

But this is even more bewildering as William is about to play in the finals of the World Series of Poker which I thought was being played in Las Vegas. But, it can’t be Las Vegas because William stands up from the poker table and walks out on the World Series of Poker to travel to Washington D.C where he plans to kill Major Gordo. We know that it must not be Vegas because Washington D.C is close enough for William to drive to in mere hours.

Confounding us further is a choice to cut from William traveling to Gordo’s house for a confrontation and an insert of the World Series of Poker where William’s hand is being played in his absence. Film language, under normal circumstances, would indicate that perhaps William is on a running clock, he knows that his chips will be collected each hand as an automatic ante and thus he knows he needs to be back before his chips run out. Or so this shot would imply.

But no, that’s not the case. WIlliam has abandoned the game with no intention of returning. So why did we cut away to the tournament continuing? What was the point of that insert? Why did that happen? If it had been a cut to Tiffany Haddish perhaps wondering if William was coming back and looking nervous and confused, that might make sense. But, that’s not the shot. Schrader specifically shows us the dealer taking chips from William’s pile and putting them in as an automatic ante.

Finally, we come to the final confrontation between William and Major Gordo. Gordo doesn’t recognize William and is confused as to why William is in his house. William has also sheeted the Major’s house, though we only noticed that briefly, he doesn’t linger on showing us the process of placing the sheets this time. The two have a verbal confrontation, William then takes the Major into another room in the house and proceeds to have a fight. The camera remains in the living room and does not follow the action into the other room.

Eventually, after several minutes, William returns to the living room. He’s battered and bloody. He uses the Major’s phone to call 911. He’s then arrested for the Major’s murder and sent back to Leavenworth where we see him last, patiently and meticulously going through a daily routine similar to the one he had before his parole. The end. No closure for Tiffany Haddish and no attempt to marry the stories of William and gambling and William’s past at Abu Ghraib. The two stories could be two completely different movies.

This is why The Card Counter is such a bad movie despite how incredible Oscar Isaac is. Director Paul Schrader makes all of the most confounding and frustrating decisions throughout the movie. In trying to avoid being typical and using familiar film language, Schrader has created a movie that is far too frustrating, far too overstuffed with elements competing with each other for attention and distracting from whatever the story is supposed to be about.

That’s another thing, what was The Card Counter all about? I’ve clearly seen the movie and tried to understand and I have no idea what the point of any of this movie was. Nevertheless, there is one great scene in The Card Counter. There is one scene where the forceful charisma of Oscar Isaac emerges and gives us a glimpse of what The Card Counter should be. When William tries to convince Cirk to go home to his mother, he chooses to confront the kids and interrogate him like he did detainees at Abu Ghraib. He uses his forceful techniques to break the kid down. It’s his last attempt to keep Cirk from ruining his life by trying to kill Gordo.

This scene is electric, it vibrates with tension and intensity. Oscar Isaac is mesmerizing in this scene and I almost could talk myself into recommending The Card Counter on the strength of this scene. Then, I remember that it’s just one scene and it actually shows just how frustrating The Card Counter is, it had so much potential to be brilliant and Schrader squanders that potential with his convoluted choices.

The Card Counter is in theaters nationwide as of September 10th, 2021.