July 19, 2009: The Cooler
Do I need to write a review for every movie that I happen to put on, and run in the background as I’m doing something else? According to my current rules, I do, although I suppose eventually I will have reviewed everything on my DVD shelf and can put on a movie without generating an extra 15 minutes of work for myself two months later.
The Cooler (2003) is the story of a sad middle-aged man played by William H. Macy, who works in a run-down Las Vegas casino as a “cooler”, an unlucky person employed by the casino who joins games at tables where players are experiencing a lucky streak, in order to try and bring bad luck to the table. Macy is a particularly unlucky fellow and therefore extremely good at his job in an almost supernatural way. He struggles also with his strong loyalty to his abusive boss, a casino manager played by Alec Balwdin, to whom Macy is indebted for helping him to forever give up his earlier gambling addiction. Baldwin sinks his teeth into a deliberate near-caricature in that way he does so well, garnering an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor.
Well, Macy’s luck changes when he meets a woman who loves him for who he is, and that totally upsets his world, with his old “friend” Baldwin suddenly becoming bitter when he no longer holds power over his loser friend, even as Baldwin’s life faces collapse in the wake of the modernization of the casino and dumping of the superstitious old-school technique of using a “cooler” to stop lucky streaks. Maria Bello, as Macy’s new reason to live, brings a slice of reality to the roles she plays (the caveat to this being that I haven’t seen Coyote Ugly in quite a long time, certainly long before I knew who Bello was, and can’t quite reconcile how she fit into that ridiculous excuse for a story), and as the cocktail waitress who finds in Macy a man with love to give and who appreciates her potential, she helps us to believe in the midst of this far-fetched story that love really could blossom between these two.
I quite like Las Vegas movies in general, and this one has the opportunity to revel in the seedy side as well as the glamorous face typically put forth by the Vegas marketing machine these days. You don’t need to go very far at all from the billion-dollar casino-hotel resorts on the Strip to find relics of the old Vegas – buildings and people – still wrapped up in their time-warped worlds until yet another place is gutted and demolished, vanishing in the name of progress, and scattering its inhabitants to the winds.
I like The Cooler as an atmospheric and intimate tale of a guy who didn’t have everything dealt to him in life, who has suffered for years and finally sees things come together when his luck changes. Of course, the way it happens, with a man whose bad luck oozes off him and contaminates those around him suddenly seeing a turnaround and all of his fortunes changing for the better, is a larger-than-life exaggeration, but we expect nothing less from that magically bipolar place known as Las Vegas, where anything can happen.
Allegorical hidden treasure. Pays off handsomely.
Post a Comment