Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Arts & Entertainment

"Down the vagina trail"
"The Vagina Monologues" writer Eve Ensler on laughter, desire and reentering her own nether regions.
By Pamela Grossman
[04/19/00]

Movie Review
"28 Days"
Not even court-ordered rehab could save this stumbling drunk of a picture.
By Charles Taylor
[04/18/00]

Movie Review
"Keeping the Faith"
Edward Norton's dopey directorial debut gives interfaith romance a bad name.
By Andrew O'Hehir
[04/18/00]

Column
Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk
Wanna talk about the Three Stooges? Soitainly!
By Joyce Millman
[04/17/00]

Movie Review
"Where the Money Is"
Credit aging bank robber Paul Newman for almost saving this merely diverting little heist comedy.
By Charles Taylor
[04/14/00]

Complete archives for Arts & Entertainment

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Stanley Tucci, who produced and directed "Joe Gould's Secret" and stars in it as Joseph Mitchell, took the opposite tack. Although a Writers Guild arbitration awarded sole screen credit for the script to Howard A. Rodman, who adapted Mitchell's two New Yorker profiles of Joe Gould, Tucci has told interviewers (including Susan Perry of Salon) that he wrote up to 80 percent of the movie.

The masterly "Croupier" (which opens in 17 cities tomorrow) and the groping, affecting "Joe Gould's Secret" address the same galvanic issues of identity and authenticity -- and the knotty questions of honesty and exploitation that go with them -- underlying manic cult films like "Fight Club" and "Being John Malkovich."

Michael Sragow Michael Sragow's column appears every Thursday in Arts & Entertainment + Archives

In "Croupier," a would-be novelist in search of his metier takes on a casino job and finds that it gives him, not just a subject, but a persona closer to his true self than "struggling writer" ever was. In "Joe Gould's Secret," Mitchell, the beloved New Yorker reporter of the '40s and '50s, stumbles upon the Greenwich Village bohemian of the title -- a Harvard-educated wastrel who's either a bum of genius or just a bum -- and realizes that Gould's vain attempt to compile a vast oral history of his time echoes Mitchell's own yearnings and frustrations.

"Croupier" is a terrific movie, mixing instinct and showmanship to turn its characters and themes inside out; the less satisfying "Joe Gould's Secret" is intriguing but a bit opaque, held aloft by Ian Holm's shattering performance as Gould. Part of the reason for the difference between the two may be that the creative team behind "Croupier" resolved its own identity crises early on while the one behind "Joe Gould's Secret" didn't -- though Rodman is, by and large, happy with the movie.

To take the merrier collaboration first: Hodges, on the phone from Dorset, England, explained that he and Mayersberg were friends before "Croupier," but hadn't partnered on a movie. Mayersberg, best known for teaming up with director Nicolas Roeg on "The Man Who Fell to Earth" and "Eureka," did a full script of "Croupier" for England's Film Four before the producers signed Hodges. The director and Mayersberg then spent six to eight months on the final draft. "I liked the script," says Hodges, "because it's a miniature in a way -- but a miniature of enormous breadth."

In its sardonic, understated fashion, "Croupier" has more to say about today's existential drift than slick packages like "American Beauty," which announce their big intentions with flowery pseudo-lyric flights. Clive Owen, who combines the leading-man virility of Dylan McDermott with the fringe psychopathy of Kevin Spacey, plays a fellow without a firm core. He's a classy British slacker who learned how to be a croupier in South Africa -- which, back in London, lends him an exotic edge. You identify with him immediately: He keeps an ironic distance from hustlers and incompetents, including the publisher who wants him to write a soccer novel and the inept casino manager who lays down impossibly rigid rules. You also feel that our antihero is dangerously unmoored, and capable of sliding down, in his own inscrutable way, to the level of his surroundings.

He lives with a policewoman turned department-store detective and he views her as his conscience. But he keeps whole areas of his life from her, including his amoral aesthetic curiosity and his kinky gambling-world addiction: He loves to watch people lose. His demeanor declares that he's on top of things. Nonetheless, before long he's cheating on his girl, breaking casino rules and becoming a passive participant in an attempted stickup.

"It seemed to me," says Hodges, "that what Paul Mayersberg was trying to do was discuss the whole business of contemporary existence. I don't think there's ever been another period when people feel as much as we do that we have matters under control, with our mobile phones and Filofaxes and insurance for life, cars, buildings and pets. We try to cover every eventuality, and it gives us a completely false sense of security. In our country a croupier is a man who doesn't own much and doesn't get paid well, but when he's at his job he is someone who controls the table. And the table ends up being all that our hero can control. I know existentialists have used gambling as a metaphor for life in many ways, but it's never seemed more appropriate than it does now. It has something to do with the kind of capitalism we have now, where labor shifts around and there is no loyalty in business."

Hodges wasn't about to settle for the screenplay as written just because he adored the script and was friends with the screenwriter. At first, he didn't believe in Mayersberg's antihero as an aspiring writer. The two "really worked on that, so the writing became as important as the gambling, and Clive's character became a sort of split personality."

What Hodges calls "the journey of him finding out about himself" includes as much subtraction as addition: Our antihero jettisons false relationships and unattainable ambitions, including the attempt to write fiction. It doesn't give anything away about the thriller side of the plot to note that he emerges as a successful but strictly one-shot writer with an "insider" novel: "I, Croupier" by Anonymous. I thought the book bore an uncanny resemblance to "Primary Colors" by Anonymous. Hodges was pleased I made the connection. "In terms of selling stories, it's really gotten pretty gruesome out there, hasn't it? Whether it's a political figure or Madonna's lover it's not a pleasing sight."

Next page | "Americans love the idea of watching people lose"