1. I haven’t done this in a while.
So here goes.
I watched the last half of (James Caan) The Gambler.
My estimation of it increased as I watched it to its end.
2. It’s ultimately a dark, upsetting film relentlessly tracing the descending arc of an emotionally crippled, neurotically driven, perverse man, Axel Freed.
3. It shows his addicted gambling to be an unreal abstraction informed by a bullshit sophomoric psychology/philosophy.
4. His idea is that picking winners is too easy.
He picks losers because that has him dancing with loss and (somehow) testing his ability to will impending loss into victory.
5. The utter incoherence of this way of him seeing his gambling finds its equivalent in the sophomoric lectures Freed gives to his NYC literature class in big part on the theme that we can will two and two into being other than four.
6. Freed is a literature professor teaching at a New York City university. But this is so unrealistically depicted as to be but an unreal prop as meaningless as his addiction, as what drives it and as foolish as the content of his lectures.
7. We never see him preparing for a class or anything else that evidences what goes into teaching.
He simply drops what he’s doing when it’s time and goes to teach his class.
It’s artificially done and is a flaw in the film.
8. Caan’s acting is good.
He effectively conveys the full repulsiveness and diseased impulsivity of Freed.
Lauren Hutton, his girl friend, by contrast, is wooden.
She fails to make her character come alive.
9. Caan’s character is coherent as is his progression through the movie.
It lays naked his bullshit personal credo by depicting his degenerating self destruction, which involves him repudiating that credo and becoming corrupt and corrupting.
10. He gets deeper into debt and, so, into trouble with the mobsters tied to his incessant gambling.
This even when he has means to absolve himself.
He loses the money he coerces his mother, a doctor, to give him, $44,000.00.
And he loses his hot streak Las Vegas winnings.
11. In the end Freed fails to live up to his jousting with loss and to will loss into victory.
Near physical danger by the mobster he’s indebted to, Freed betrays any pretence of honour.
He agrees to corrupt a basketball player in his class by getting him to shave points.
12. In fact, that he really can’t live up to his own code is foreshadowed by coercing his mother to bail him out of debt and is after-shadowed by whining in disappointment to his wealthy grandfather for refusing to bail him out of subsequent debt.
13. When Lauren Hutton stands statue stiff as he tries sexually to coax her into responding to him, two and two stay adding to four despite what Freed wills.
He’s left mired in utter humiliating futility, as if embracing and kissing a fencepost.
Finally, he just walks away.
14. In a near to final scene, Freed doesn’t know till the last minute whether the bought basketball player will shave the points.
He does.
But Freed then learns it’s not one and done.
He and the player will have to do more on pain of pain.
The mob has its hooks into them.
15. In a culmination of Freed’s perverse self loathing and degenerate self destruction, he gets into a vicious fight with a pimp, whose whore has dissatisfied Freed.
While he’s beating the shit out of the pimp, taking his self hatred out on him, she slashes Freed across his face.
16. In the last scene, after staunching the bleeding, Freed staggers to a mirror.
He smiles in perverse satisfaction at his bloody scarred face.
It’s the apotheosis of his sick self destruction, a perverse anti redemption of triumphant self punishment at his own putrid emptiness.
17. Freed temporarily expiates his fury with himself, sprung from finally seeing clearly what a scum he actually is.
18. My judgment is that The Gambler isn’t about a gambler or gambling.
It’s more centrally about a mentally-diseased, intellectual-type man who acts out his pathetic neuroses and self-destructiveness through the medium of gambling.
19. Finally, Freed repudiates gambling by complicity in fixing games.
His credo has shattered like a thin glass pane.
His anti redemption is his perverse pleasure in the evidentiary visibility of being severely facially slashed, desirable punishment expiating self hatred.
20/20. And in the end, no one lives happily ever after.
The End
