Film Carew: Selma, The Gambler

SELMA

“Rarely does an issue lay bare the secret heart of America itself,” intones Tom Wilkinson, playing Lyndon B. Johnson, the 36th President of the United States. He’s talking — at a televised Congressional address — about the civil rights movement, a film that Ava DuVernay’s earnest drama chronicles through the watershed year of 1965, in which Dr. Martin Luther King agitated for the systematically-denied voting rights of blacks in Alabama.

50 years on, and this same issue still dwells at the secret heart of America; still lays bare an essential national struggle that taps into the core of the nation’s individual and collective identity. When DuVernay rolls real footage of gasmasked, nightstick-wielding Alabama state troopers attacking non-violent protestors in Selma, Alabama, in 1965, there’s an eerie, unsettling resonance; the old newsreel looking uncannily like footage from the frontlines of Ferguson, Missouri in 2014.

It’s this timeliness that gives a real life to Selma, a film that, otherwise, hews to an earnest portrayal of cultural activism begetting political action. Rather than posit a simple biopic portrait of Dr. King, it forsakes the myopic One Great Man view of history to show social change as a culmination of many overlapping factors; mounting a multi-layered mosaic in which meetings at all levels of society discuss, essentially, the political process.

There’s an eerie, unsettling resonance; the old newsreel looking uncannily like footage from the frontlines of Ferguson, Missouri in 2014.

This means that, whilst David Oyelowo’s sterling turn in the leading role — in which there’s as much aching soul as mere mimickry; and, oh yes, plenty of passionate oration — gets all the plaudits, the real revelation in Selma is how widely it casts its net, and the vast cast it uses to do so. There’s a host of known names — Oprah, Cuba Gooding Jr., Tim Roth, Alessandro Nivola, Giovanni Ribisi, Martin Sheen, Stephen Root — in even the tiniest of roles, but there’s also a healthy dose of rising actors having a real moment.

Tessa Thompson, bouncing from her breakout in Dear White People, carries herself with genuine command; Andre Holland, so brilliant in Steven Soderbergh’s auteur-TV triumph The Knick, does little to dent his growing reputation; Keith Stanfield, the non-professional scene-stealer from Short Term 12, is electric in his few scenes as doomed agitator Jimmie Lee Jackson. The acting is uniformly excellent — there’s not a weak turn across the ensemble — and this, too, adds further life to the film.

Selma opens with Oyelowo in Norway, receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. He’s on top of the world, but as soon as he sets foot in Alabama, he still gets punched in the face. Here, civil rights protestors are marching into the teeth of the segregated South, of All-American racism at its most Red State and redneck: Boss Hogg-esque Sherriffs, lynch-mobbin’ Klansmen, mom-and-pop types waving ‘Niggers Go Home’ signs, Confederate flags fluttering in an ill wind, a “constant fog of death” hanging over the protest-marchers’ every footstep.

At its best, the film is almost reminiscent of Ken Loach: fervent discussions about political protest and immediate action breaking out between activists, there a desperate air to their debates given that, on the streets, blunt, ugly violence awaits. With so many issues to address, so many problems to confront, and so much injustice, the debate boils down to: where, and how, do you start?

This, too, seems an especially resonant question in the current climes, and one Selma leaves to linger. “Sometimes history and fate meet at a single time in a single place,” Wilkinson says, but DuVernay never allows her film to settle into the safety of history, to take mere ‘inspiration’ from the righteous sedition of a half-century prior. Selma’s civil activism is a story worth telling, to her, due to how badly its needed in the here-and-now.

The Gambler

“It’s not easy to make people care about a guy who steals from his mother to pay gambling debts,” James Caan once famously — or infamously — said about 1974’s The Gambler. But, really, the hard, nasty flick didn’t need you to: James Toback’s first script a hysterical portrait of masculinity on the edge, in which Caan plays the titular bettor, a nihilist throwing himself headlong into self-destruction.

That shit flew in 1974, with English kitchen-sink hand Karel Reisz recruited to bring his socio-realist rawness to bear amidst New American cinema’s golden age, and Caan’s frothing, failing anti-hero a man for a nation in turmoil. But in 2015, multiplex audiences have been inculcated to expect portraits of Winners, no matter who they are or how they get there, and a remade Gambler can’t just rubberneck at the grim horror of a death-spiral.

There’s no way anyone could care about the character Wahlberg plays here.

Now, instead of Caan coked to the gills and chewing the scenery, we get Mark Wahlberg smirking his way through a feather-haired leading-man role; the film instantly feeling like a cred-mongering vanity project for a beefcake superstar who’s recently served a penance in Michael Bay’s trenches.

And there’s no way anyone could care about the character Wahlberg plays here: a rich, egomaniacal, self-delusional dickwad in designer suits, he gambles like “the kind of guy who likes to lose”, and yet everywhere he goes people are just giving him bags of money. When Jessica Lange, as his fire-breathing heiress mother, takes him along to the bank to get out a quarter of a mil to save his life, Wahlberg is like a petulant teenager, annoyed that mom just won’t leave him alone.

It wouldn’t matter much if Marky Mark was supposed to be a detestable fuckface, but this Gambler isn’t content to hitch a ride into the abyss as a man with everything cashes it all in for nothing. Instead, the film — written by William Monahan; directed by Rupert Wyatt (who stepped off the Planet Of The Apes escalator to helm this); and shot by Greig Fraser (who brings the same drab, slatey palette to bear, here, as he just did on Foxcatcher) — desperately wants you to care about Wahlberg.

It wants you to pull for him to pull Brie Larson, to get out of his jam, to make it on his own, to shake off the baggage of his familial millions. When Wahlberg, in one of his many word monologues, opines that only two options — “victory or death” — appeal to him, Monahan lays out a moral road-map for where it’s going to head; a black-and-white binary that those in the cheap-seats (whom the film explains both poker and point-shaving to, patiently) can follow along with. Forty years ago, an anti-hero could willingly choose death; here, now, we’re stuck with — hollow, unearned, unlikely, unlikeable — victory.