When does a gambling habit become a gambling problem? Is it when you’re down to your last wadded-up banknote, which you keep stuffed in your sock till all else has been spent? Or maybe it’s that extreme moment you’re forced to fake your own death, just to throw off your creditors. Surely things have gotten out of hand when the British government sends a private detective (who looks an awful lot like Tilda Swinton) all the way to Macau to collect the fortune you swindled from an unsuspecting old lady to subsidize your addiction.
In “Ballad of a Small Player,” Colin Farrell is a reckless high-roller, all flop sweat and false bravado, who’s taken up residence in a decadent Chinese casino hotel. He has three days to settle his HK$145,000 hotel bill, or else they turn him over the authorities. (For now, they won’t send another bottle of bubbly to his suite or let him use the house limo service.) Gambling is all about stakes, and these don’t seem quite high enough — at least, not until a body goes hurtling past the window of the dining room where he’s eating, and then we realize what rock bottom looks like: a corpse crumpled on top of a car in the parking lot below, having hurtled itself off the roof only moments before.
Edward Berger’s polar-opposite follow-up to last year’s “Conclave” is also the polar opposite of movies that it would seem to resemble: films like “Leaving Las Vegas,” “Under the Volcano” and “Uncut Gems,” where desperate men (always men) burn the fuse right down to the quick. Farrell’s character calls himself Lord Freddy Doyle, though in fact, he’s little more than a fraud, spending other people’s money in pursuit of whatever thrill winning gives. But it’s not winning this man wants. It’s easy come, easy go where money’s concerned. Doyle is motivated by the fear of complete financial ruin and whatever consequences that might bring.
The locals call guys like this gwai lo, or ghosts, which doesn’t feel quite right for Doyle, who’s anything but invisible, striding through town in his bespoke burgundy suit, neatly tied ascot and bright yellow gloves. This conspicuous foreigner looks like a cross between Quentin Crisp and a 1970s Harlem pimp. He doesn’t exactly blend in — although, to be fair, it takes a lot to compete with the garish neon casinos that rise up about him like the debauched skyline of Rouge City in Spielberg’s “A.I. Artificial Intelligence.”
“Lord” Doyle is what we might call a cad. He believes that a man can reinvent himself in Macau, but his past keeps catching up with him. That’s what the private detective with the cheap shoes and designer spectacles, who calls herself Betty, but is really named Cynthia Blithe (that would be Swinton), serves to remind. She’s there to collect something like a million pounds, which Doyle owes her client. He has practically none to his name, but if she’ll just spot him 500 quid, he can turn it into enough to square his debts (well, some of them, at least).
“How ’bout dinner and a dance?” he says. “We can come to some kind of arrangement.” Blithe obliges, and sure enough, like some kind of magician, Doyle starts winning. But he’s still a long way from a million, and Blithe (who doesn’t look like any detective we’ve seen before) gives him 24 hours. For a so-called small player like this, deadlines don’t mean much. Everything’s negotiable. And so the movie becomes increasingly tiresome, watching Farrell oscillate from low to high, as DP James Friend shoves his high-def camera right up in his pores, or else shoots the actor from halfway across town, so he’s nothing but a tiny speck in a world of excess.
Adapted from the book by Lawrence Osborne, “Ballad of a Small Player” should feel like a film noir (Doyle could be lifted from one of Graham Greene’s novels), but Berger takes it in the other direction. Visually, it’s a stunning, vibrant film, as detailed and decadent as Paolo Sorrentino’s “The Great Beauty,” with the colors narrowed to a Wong Kar Wai palette. Hong Kong is just a stone’s throw away, after all, though Doyle is persona non grata there. He’s run out of options, having exhausted his credit at even the Rainbow Casino, where a filthy-mouthed grandma (Deanie Ip) wipes him clean at baccarat.
Enter what the movie’s loose equivalent of a femme fatale, Fala Chen (Dao Ming), who lends money to losers at exorbitant rates, but sees something in Doyle that, frankly, the rest of us don’t. The two spend a night together by the shore, and Doyle awakens with numbers penned on his palm: a test of character that raises his already bombastic redemption/self-immolation several notches higher. It’s hard to follow how much of what’s happening from here on is real, as Berger never really established how gravity works in this world.
We watch Doyle win his way back on top, but the roller coaster has gone off the rails by this point. One minute, he’s having a heart attack, the next he’s shoveling fistfuls of lobster into his face. It’s no fault of Farrell’s. The actor is fully committed to this anxious caricature of a man who doesn’t know when to call it quits, but Doyle’s psychology is all over the map. Compared to great portraits of people dominated by their gambling compulsion — “Bay of Angels,” “Bob le Flambeur,” “Mississippi Grind,” “The Cooler” — “Ballad of a Small Player” looks great, but lacks the fundamental human insight to make it a winner.
