{"id":4207,"date":"2021-11-03T00:41:48","date_gmt":"2021-11-03T00:41:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/farefwd.com\/?p=4207"},"modified":"2021-11-03T00:41:52","modified_gmt":"2021-11-03T00:41:52","slug":"the-card-counter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/2021\/11\/03\/the-card-counter\/","title":{"rendered":"The Card Counter"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Paul Schrader\u2019s latest movie finds another angle from which to ask the same question that has haunted the filmmaker throughout his career.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Review by Michael O\u2019Malley<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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The Card Counter<\/em>, the new movie from writer-director Paul Schrader, is not for the faint of heart. It focuses, after all, on a transient gambler trying to atone for his former career as a torturer at Abu Ghraib, the detention center in which American personnel brutally raped, abused, and tortured prisoners during the Iraq War. In other respects, though, this story of a loner in search of atonement is just another Friday at the movies for Schrader.<\/p>

Paul Schrader is no stranger to atonement. The filmmaker\u2019s early life was dominated by his upbringing in the Dutch Reformed church, whose especially strict Calvinist theology focuses on the depravity of humankind. Schrader left the church of his family as a young adult to pursue a career as first a film critic and then a filmmaker himself. Despite that departure, much of his work has been haunted by the same issues that surround the entire project of Christianity: what it means for a single act of gruesome violence to redeem a fallen world.<\/p>

It\u2019s all over his career and often positioned in intentionally troubling ways, from the ending of 1976\u2019s Taxi Driver<\/em>, which ends with the ironic crowning of a white-supremacist terrorist as a \u201csavior,\u201d all the way through 2018\u2019s First Reformed<\/em>, in which a radicalized pastor makes a suicidal attempt for ecological justice. How can a monstrous world truly change without radical acts of violence? And yet how is such violence not monstrous in its own way?<\/p>

The Card Counter<\/em> is yet another version of this story. Oscar Isaac stars as William Tell, a man who learns to count cards during his imprisonment for the war crimes he committed as a rank-and-file torturer at Abu Ghraib. When he is released from prison, he adopts a nomadic life in which he drives across North America from casino to casino, supporting himself with his new card-counting abilities. But Tell is plagued by his former life, haunted by dreams of his deeds in Iraq. In much the same way that Tell devotedly tracks the cards on the blackjack table, he also counts the toll of his past, always obsessing over the same power dynamics: how the house wins, and the role he plays in that win.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Sin doesn\u2019t come out of an individualized vacuum; it\u2019s part of a whole web of injustices, power dynamics, and systemic factors. <\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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The plot proper begins when Tell sneaks into a private arms and security convention hosted by his ex-superior from Abu Ghraib, John Gordo (Willem Dafoe) and on his way out is stopped by a young man named Cirk (Tye Sheridan), the son of one of Tell\u2019s fellow torturers in Iraq\u2014who, Cirk reveals, has since killed himself as the bitter end of a cycle of violence and drug abuse that began in Abu Ghraib. Cirk wants Tell to help him kidnap, torture, and execute John Gordo as an act of vigilante justice. Because, as Cirk points out, there has been no justice; when the abuses at Abu Ghraib became widely known, low-ranking participants like Cirk\u2019s father and Tell himself were convicted for their crimes, while Gordo and most of the high-ranking architects of Abu Ghraib\u2019s abuses ducked any publicity or punishment, honorably retiring to become well-compensated private-sector consultants. William Tell refuses Cirk, but it\u2019s clear that Cirk\u2019s quest has resonated with him. The house won, and he now bears the moral debt. And as Calvinists know, moral debt beckons a violent reckoning\u2014the death of one to redeem another.<\/p>

What makes The Card Counter<\/em> stand out from Schrader\u2019s previous films is scale. Many of his most famous movies are concerned with the salvation of one individual, most notably his Taxi Driver<\/em> screenplay, in which the protagonist massacres the owners of a brothel in order to save a single underage sex worker. The Card Counter<\/em> isn\u2019t completely devoid of such questions of individual salvation; part of Tell\u2019s interest in Cirk pivots on a quite literal desire to pay Cirk\u2019s debts with his gambling winnings. But Tell and Cirk\u2019s personal connections to one of the most nakedly cruel seasons of the American empire turns the question of their individual salvations into a question of atonement for the sins of their whole country.<\/p>

The Card Counter<\/em> complicates the individualism endemic in much of modern American Christianity\u2019s ideas about salvation. The common Evangelical refrain of \u201cJesus died for your<\/em> sins\u201d operates under the assumption of hermetically sealed sin\u2014the significance of a sin is its eternal effect on the soul of the person who commits it, and so Christ\u2019s atonement is primarily spoken of in terms of the \u201cwashing clean\u201d of that soul. But sin doesn\u2019t come out of an individualized vacuum; it\u2019s part of a whole web of injustices, power dynamics, and systemic factors. The Card Counter<\/em>\u2019s context of military violence is perhaps the most extreme example possible of this concept. The horrific abuse committed by U.S. personnel against prisoners at Abu Ghraib could not have been possible without the apparatus of an enormous nation-state bent around creating conditions that encourage such abuse. Moreover, the cleansing of individual perpetrators\u2019 souls does nothing to redeem the catastrophic suffering caused by that nation-state. Perhaps Tell has turned his life around; perhaps his soul has been saved. But, as Tell sees so clearly and dispiritingly in the cushy post-military life of John Gordo, the engine of the American Empire grinds on. What is the Gospel when not simply individuals but entire nations are totally depraved?<\/p>

The closest precedent to this question in Schrader\u2019s filmography is his previous film, First Reformed<\/em>, when an environmental activist asks what becomes the film\u2019s backbone: \u201cCan God forgive us for what we have done to this world?\u201d\u2014with emphasis on the collective atonement of us<\/em> rather than the individual me<\/em> or you<\/em>. The Card Counter<\/em> is both smaller-scale and knottier when it comes to the question of collective atonement: smaller for its focus on a single nation rather than the entire planet and knottier for the ways that closer focus allows for more troubling specifics.<\/p>

Perhaps it\u2019s because of the knottier complexities of The Card Counter<\/em>\u2019s subject that unfortunately Schrader seems as though he\u2019s run out of things to say by the end. Unlike First Reformed<\/em>, the ultimate violence here feels less like a tragic inevitability and more like an obligation to the theological and political framework that Schrader has set up. There\u2019s something hollow about the descent into the same tropes about isolated men looking for violent spiritual release that Schrader has built up over the past forty-plus years of filmmaking when they are applied to something as specific and grotesque as Abu Ghraib.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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One man is redeemed; what does that do for the whole of us together?<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Especially in the end, this movie runs aground of its own questions of individual vs. collective atonement, and it\u2019s hard not to feel as though the actions of these particular individuals are frustratingly futile\u2014what could one man\u2019s retributively violent arc have to say about atonement for an entire nation\u2019s abuses? Charitably, \u201cit\u2019s a metaphor\u201d is perhaps the tact Schrader intends. Less charitably, one could credibly accuse the movie of appropriating the graphic evocation of Abu Ghraib as an ornament to one man\u2019s spiritual journey. Neither lens results in a satisfying conclusion.<\/p>

It\u2019s somewhat appropriate that with this film, Schrader seems to have reached the limits of his wrestling with the tenets of his childhood faith. A theology in which justice hinges solely on the violent punishment of individual actors\u2014whether they be the souls of the damned in Hell or the human incarnation of God\u2014will struggle to have a meaningful response to problems that are systemic and collective in nature. While Schrader himself may be critical of such a theology to begin with, his structuring of his films runs into the same problems as the theology itself. Individualism does not scale.<\/p>

That\u2019s saying nothing of Christ\u2019s resurrection, the cornerstone of the faith that often rests semi-neglected in the shadow of Reformed theology\u2019s obsession with the violence of the crucifixion. But it\u2019s the resurrection that makes Christian faith not simply about the purging of the world\u2019s evils but also about the restoration of that world. Schrader seems to realize this, ending The Card Counter<\/em> as he often does, with the protagonist given a measure of grace after the climactic violence, but again, the film seems stuck in the individualism of the theology it critiques. One man is redeemed; what does that do for the whole of us together?<\/p>

What does a theology look like that proclaims that Christ died and rose not for me<\/em> but for us<\/em>, to redeem the sick complicity that we have in the exploitation and abuses of our nations? It\u2019s not as if The Card Counter<\/em> doesn\u2019t realize the importance of these questions. But for all its insight in arriving at those questions, it seems incapable of going any further. The answers to those questions must be politically radical and collectively transformational, which is something that Schrader simply does not seem to have the tools to follow through on in his filmmaking. When all you have is retribution, everything looks like a nail in the cross.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Michael O’Malley<\/strong> is a high school English teacher in Knoxville, TN. He loves his wife, two children, and public transportation.<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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The Card Counter<\/strong> was directed by Paul Schrader and released by Focus Films on September 10, 2021. <\/em>
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Paul Schrader\u2019s latest movie finds another angle from which to ask the same question that has haunted the filmmaker throughout his career. 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