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The British director Mike Hodges never lays his cards on the table. His tricky style contains all the alluring deceptiveness of someone with an ace up his sleeve. In "Croupier," his 1997 film which is just now being released in this country, Hodges's style amounts to no more than a parlor trick. But there's a certain fascination in watching him go through the mechanics.

Drawn to pulp by temperament, Hodges is best known for the 1971 "Get Carter," a supremely nasty thriller starring Michael Caine as a mob hit man out to avenge his murdered brother. It's a movie whose reputation has grown in the last few years. A remake is due out this summer, and British film critics now generally acclaim it the greatest British gangster film of all time. "Get Carter" is too well-made to be dismissed, and presents an unflinching view of the bleakness of life in '70s Northern England. But no matter how much critics talk about its stylishness or excitement, the movie is no fun -- the acclaim seems to be largely a fetishizing of the picture's nastiness as honesty, an elevation of pulp's blinkered, gutter view. The worse Caine's Carter treats people (especially women) the more critics can claim the film to be an honest depiction of gangster life. In audience terms, though, that "honesty" doesn't translate into pleasure. What's the fun of watching a "hero" who's as much of a scumbag as the scumbags he's hunting down?

The follow-up to "Get Carter," "Pulp," is a wildly uneven comedy with Caine as a potboiler novelist hired to ghostwrite the biography of a faded movie star (Mickey Rooney, in a performance that seemed to squeeze in every piece of horrendous movie star behavior he'd ever seen or heard about). It showed Hodges was able to treat this sort of tough-guy material with satirical distance. "Croupier" suggests that the a director is trying to live up to the new-found reputation of his previous work by dressing up the sleazy milieu he's attracted to in post-modern gimmickry. As in "Pulp," there's a writer at the center of "Croupier." Jack Manfred (Clive Owen) is a blocked would-be novelist who takes a job as a croupier in a mid-level London casino. Jack had done this sort of work before in his native South Africa and finds himself slipping back into this world once again, hooked on the high of seeing people lose.

Hodge's casino -- where small-timers with money to waste can fantasize that they're high rollers -- is as authentic as the glimpses of the blighted north in "Get Carter." Hodges and his cinematographer Mike Garfath make the gambling den all sleek reflecting surfaces, a hall of mirrors promising a seedy version of the good life. And they've got the habitues of the place down pat. The faces of the men and women are just a little too reddened with drink and their own determination to have a good time. There's desperation just below the surface of those faces, and the clothes the "punters" (as the customers are called) wear are the flashy double-breasted suits and spangled cocktail dresses that announce that the wearers are flush -- if only for the next few spins of the roulette wheel.

Hodges and screenwriter Paul Mayersberg ("The Man Who Fell to Earth," "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence") don't get into the mindset of compulsive gamblers the way Robert Altman did in "California Split" or Jacques Demy did in his great "Bay of the Angels" (with Jeanne Moreau as a noirish Lady Luck siren). They're more interested in the games being played away from the tables, notably the illusion-and-reality games playing themselves out in Jack's head. Jack's live-in girlfriend Marion (Gina McKee) complains that he's so caught up in his new job that he's neglecting his writing. He's not really serious about becoming a novelists; sitting at his computer with a drink and a smoldering cigarette, and a black fedora for his thinking cap, Jack is less a writer than someone living out a fantasy of being a writer. Mayersberg employs Jack's thoughts, which sound as if they've come out of bad hard-boiled fiction, as a voiceover contrast to his impassive, professional manner. After a few months in the casino, he finds the place providing material for the potboiler he's always dreamed of writing. He's meticulous about his job, but he goes on to break nearly every rule the casino enforces because it gives him something to write about. And when he starts seeing the femme fatale Jani (Alex Kingston of "ER"), a regular at his table, outside of work, in direct violation of casino rules against fraternizing with customers, she gives him even more material, especially when she reveals her shady connections.

Jack has the sort of reserved smugness that conveys that he thinks he's smarter than everybody around him. In noir terms that makes him a perfect patsy, begging to be set up. Jack is bright enough to see he's being played by Jani but he goes along for the ride. For that to work, Clive Owen would have to suggest something more than the rather bored self-absorption that appears his only means of expression. Mayersberg and Hodges flirt with identity games like having Jack dye his hair black when he takes the job and refer to himself in the third-person in the voiceover narration. But there's no thrill in Owen's descent into borderline-criminal behavior, not even the compulsion of a writer giving into self-destructiveness to live out the pulpy fantasies he's writing. (That was satirized effectively in George Romero's film of Stephen King's "The Dark Half.")

When the lead of a noir thriller doesn't show much avidity for anything except being a prick, there's nothing to provide the sense of complicity noir needs. And the problem is compounded because Hodges and Mayersberg hold themselves at as much of a distance as their hero. The double-crosses and noir trappings are just an excuse for them to play their po-mo games about a writer's "identity." They play it elegantly. "Croupier," like nearly every Hodges movie I've seen, is remarkably well-made. But it doesn't come together except as a conceit. (The exception among Hodges's films is his rather meanly derided "Flash Gordon," which was a deluxe and dazzling piece of Saturday-afternoon camp. If you're looking for something you can enjoy with your kids, try "Flash Gordon" -- especially in the widescreen DVD. It has an infectitious, stylized silliness.)

Hodges' view of women has progressed since his early films -- somewhat. Gina McKee and Kate Hardie (who has a brittle, neurotic presence as Jack's coworker, a hooker turned croupier) aren't the bimbo clothes-shedders of "Get Carter." They stand for something much more wised-up than Jack. (Alex Kingston's Jani is too much the mystery woman cut-out figure -- the role, I mean, not the performance.) But the women's roles still wind up being classified too neatly as nags and bitches and duplicitious seductresses.

"Croupier" isn't an average failed film. It's been made with too much care and attention to craft. I'm glad that, after three years, it's finally getting an American release. I just wish it added up to something more than the exercise in style that it does. Hodges knows how to shuffle the cards. If he ever decided to lose his cool stance and go for broke, the results could be fascinating.

salon.com | April 20, 2000

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