Movie stars come from the unlikeliest places. Take the case of one Mark Wahlberg, for example. In youth, he was a juvenile delinquent, with a criminal record that has recently made the news because of his efforts to obtain an official pardon. The younger brother of a boy-band star, he started rapping as Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch, followed by a brief career as an underwear model—a sorry resume, an instant laughingstock. By all rights, the guy should’ve been relegated to cable-TV Remember the ’90s specials by now. Instead, Wahlberg has been a bankable movie star since Boogie Nights, and a reliably strong anchor for action movies and comedies alike. He’s also smart enough to recognize that juicy supporting parts (a comic stud in Date Night, an aggressive skeptic in The Departed) can only bolster his image, and establish his range. The lesson: Don’t look at the resume. Look at the screen.
Wahlberg’s new film, The Gambler, presents a case in point. The movie has its roots in Dostoyevsky and a thoughtful, near-classic ’70s film. The lead role is a failed novelist and university professor, whose gambling problem and apparent death wish is at the crux of the story. Not a Mark Wahlberg role, in short. But he plays it, and he’s terrific.
Wahlberg’s character, Jim Bennett, has a great deal to feel burned out about. He’s disgusted with his career as a writer, he insults his students, and he asks his mother (Jessica Lange) for enormous amounts of money. He needs the bread because he’s in debt to bad people: Asian mobsters, a sleek loan shark (Michael Kenneth Williams, from Boardwalk Empire), and a seriously lethal gangster (John Goodman, in primo form). He has one talented student (Brie Larson, the gifted actress from Short Term 12) who knows about his gambling. With her character, William Monahan’s script steers a little too closely toward the cliche of the younger woman who redeems the exhausted hero—but there are surprises mixed in, too.
The film is adapted from the 1974 picture written by the eccentric James Toback and starring James Caan. The new one is a slicker affair, but Monahan is a clever dialogue writer (he did The Departed), and director Rupert Wyatt keeps the pulse going. It wastes no time: In the opening sequence, we see Bennett unhesitatingly throwing down fat wagers at a blackjack table—he refuses to set aside any winnings—and within moments the stakes are set for the rest of the movie. Wyatt’s vision of L.A.’s steel-blue underworld is just a few blocks over from the stylized place we saw in Nightcrawler and Drive. Are there really gangsters who frequent steam rooms and Korean gambling dens and speak with the elegance of John Goodman’s barn-burning soliloquies? No, but the film makes it all persuasive. Wyatt (The Escapist, Rise of the Planet of the Apes) isn’t as interested in psychological digging, although there’s something intriguing about Bennett’s assertions that he isn’t actually a gambler. (Maybe he just really wants to lose, in every sense.) But sometimes plot can carry the day, and the strands of The Gambler—Jim parlaying his various debts against each other, and betting on a basketball game—are skillfully played.
Will you buy Wahlberg as a literature professor? Maybe not, and yet the actor spits out dialogue and stares down goons with complete authority. The exhaustion seems real, too—he looks drawn, much less robust than when he’s battling robots or talking to animatronic teddy bears. We are in that realm that is less about acting and more about the mysterious power of movie stardom. And in those terms, Mark Wahlberg has successfully doubled down.
film@seattleweekly.com
THE GAMBLER Opens Thurs., Dec. 25 at Sundance and other theaters. Rated R. 111 minutes.
