1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 27: Hard eight
The first movie directed by Paul Thomas Anderson bears less resemblance to his sprawling Boogie Nights and Magnolia than to his focused, enigmatic character study, Punch-Drunk Love. It’s also a bit like an Edward Hopper painting. The characters are lonely souls.
Somewhere between Reno and Las Vegas, an old man finds a younger one slumped outside a diner. The old man offers to buy the young man a cup of coffee.
The young man is broke. He’s been gambling, trying to raise money for his mother’s funeral.
I admire your intention, the old man says. You won’t win enough to pay for the funeral, though.
On the other hand, I can take you to a casino and show you how to obtain a meal and a room.
The old man, Sydney, is played by Philip Baker Hall. He wears a dark suit and measures his words carefully.
John C. Reilly plays John, the young man. John is awkward and, at first, suspicious. He insists on sitting in the back of the car while Sydney drives him to the casino.
Sydney makes good on his promise. He shows John how to scam the casino using a small amount of cash (also, how to obtain food and lodging while doing this). His method is slick rather than miraculous. Still, it’s at least a little reminiscent of Jesus’s multiplication of loaves and fishes.
What is just as important, John feels he’s been treated kindly. He becomes Sydney’s disciple.
Sydney also shows kindness to Clementine (Gwyneth Paltrow), a cocktail waitress and occasional prostitute. As with John, Sydney does more than help her: he involves her in his life.
The story has one other important character, a man Sydney does not take kindly to. This is Jimmy (Samuel L. Jackson).
Jimmy hangs around the casinos and becomes friendly with the impressionable John. John introduces Jimmy to Sydney. Sydney’s contempt is evident. He rebukes Jimmy for uttering crude remarks about women. But this cannot be the only reason for the contempt that Sydney conveys through small disturbances in his otherwise impeccable manners.
Why does Sydney regard Jimmy as he does?
Is it that, unlike John and Clementine, Jimmy panders to Sydney, approaching him and buying him a drink?
Is it that, as a security worker, Jimmy is allied with the casinos in a way that Clementine, the waitress, is not?
When Sydney asks whether Jimmy is a parking-lot guard, Jimmy is annoyed; he works in the casino, he insists. But this may actually get near to the heart of Sydney’s distaste. It isn’t the lowliness of Jimmy’s station that puts Sydney out of joint (arguably, John and Clementine are lower than Jimmy). It’s whose side Jimmy is on. Jimmy is a snake.
This would answer another question, which is how Sydney, who is generous and scrupulously polite, could allow himself to work as a professional gambler, a kind of lowlife who obtains his livelihood by making other people lose. Perhaps what matters to Sydney is what kind of opposition he chooses to go up against. At times, he seems like one of those chivalrous heroes of the hard-boiled genre, a Philip Marlowe of the gambling circuit.
These are conjectures. Sydney isn’t easy to decipher, and there is more to him than I’ve described.
His attitude toward Jimmy is hardly the greatest mystery about him. The most important question is why Sydney treats John the way he does, as a father would treat a son.
This mystery is resolved, at least partly, by a late revelation. But even afterward, questions remain. I’d have to view the movie again to settle on an interpretation.
Not that it would matter. The movie isn’t about any point that it tries or doesn’t try to make. It’s content to observe these characters, to take long looks at them. Especially, at Sydney.
There is a certain pleasure in watching a meticulous person go about his business. Sydney is no fool. He keeps his own life tidy. He tidies up others’ lives, as quietly as possible. I wonder if, to him, other people are like cards in a game of patience (though, of course, they are more than that; they are also creatures with real sensitivities). He is absorbed in the task of putting the cards into order, or perhaps in letting the order come to him, as it will come to a patient gambler who understands the odds. Only rarely does impulse get the better of such a man; and when it does, well, that’s just an impetus for more tidying up.
I am not that sort of person. I am interested in Sydney because he is that way.
Somewhere between Reno and Las Vegas, an old man finds a younger one slumped outside a diner. The old man offers to buy the young man a cup of coffee.
The young man is broke. He’s been gambling, trying to raise money for his mother’s funeral.
I admire your intention, the old man says. You won’t win enough to pay for the funeral, though.
On the other hand, I can take you to a casino and show you how to obtain a meal and a room.
The old man, Sydney, is played by Philip Baker Hall. He wears a dark suit and measures his words carefully.
John C. Reilly plays John, the young man. John is awkward and, at first, suspicious. He insists on sitting in the back of the car while Sydney drives him to the casino.
Sydney makes good on his promise. He shows John how to scam the casino using a small amount of cash (also, how to obtain food and lodging while doing this). His method is slick rather than miraculous. Still, it’s at least a little reminiscent of Jesus’s multiplication of loaves and fishes.
What is just as important, John feels he’s been treated kindly. He becomes Sydney’s disciple.
Sydney also shows kindness to Clementine (Gwyneth Paltrow), a cocktail waitress and occasional prostitute. As with John, Sydney does more than help her: he involves her in his life.
The story has one other important character, a man Sydney does not take kindly to. This is Jimmy (Samuel L. Jackson).
Jimmy hangs around the casinos and becomes friendly with the impressionable John. John introduces Jimmy to Sydney. Sydney’s contempt is evident. He rebukes Jimmy for uttering crude remarks about women. But this cannot be the only reason for the contempt that Sydney conveys through small disturbances in his otherwise impeccable manners.
Why does Sydney regard Jimmy as he does?
Is it that, unlike John and Clementine, Jimmy panders to Sydney, approaching him and buying him a drink?
Is it that, as a security worker, Jimmy is allied with the casinos in a way that Clementine, the waitress, is not?
When Sydney asks whether Jimmy is a parking-lot guard, Jimmy is annoyed; he works in the casino, he insists. But this may actually get near to the heart of Sydney’s distaste. It isn’t the lowliness of Jimmy’s station that puts Sydney out of joint (arguably, John and Clementine are lower than Jimmy). It’s whose side Jimmy is on. Jimmy is a snake.
This would answer another question, which is how Sydney, who is generous and scrupulously polite, could allow himself to work as a professional gambler, a kind of lowlife who obtains his livelihood by making other people lose. Perhaps what matters to Sydney is what kind of opposition he chooses to go up against. At times, he seems like one of those chivalrous heroes of the hard-boiled genre, a Philip Marlowe of the gambling circuit.
These are conjectures. Sydney isn’t easy to decipher, and there is more to him than I’ve described.
His attitude toward Jimmy is hardly the greatest mystery about him. The most important question is why Sydney treats John the way he does, as a father would treat a son.
This mystery is resolved, at least partly, by a late revelation. But even afterward, questions remain. I’d have to view the movie again to settle on an interpretation.
Not that it would matter. The movie isn’t about any point that it tries or doesn’t try to make. It’s content to observe these characters, to take long looks at them. Especially, at Sydney.
There is a certain pleasure in watching a meticulous person go about his business. Sydney is no fool. He keeps his own life tidy. He tidies up others’ lives, as quietly as possible. I wonder if, to him, other people are like cards in a game of patience (though, of course, they are more than that; they are also creatures with real sensitivities). He is absorbed in the task of putting the cards into order, or perhaps in letting the order come to him, as it will come to a patient gambler who understands the odds. Only rarely does impulse get the better of such a man; and when it does, well, that’s just an impetus for more tidying up.
I am not that sort of person. I am interested in Sydney because he is that way.