The troubled distribution history of Croupier has been well-documented - filmed in 1997, released with barely a whimper in 1999, the critics' darling in America and subsequently re-released in Britain with the fanfare deserving of the director of Get Carter - and now that the brouhaha has somewhat subsided, we are better placed to evaluate Hodges's cold, emotionally autistic film. As a challenging exploration of reality and artifice rather than the workings of a casino, Hodges incorporates playful post-modern musings on casino entertainment, literary creations and taut performances to fashion an art-house thriller with few thrills but plenty of mood.
As with his earlier films, Hodges is as concerned with atmosphere and a feel for his narrative world as anything else. Get Carter accurately captured urban crime in transition - the derelict Newcastle tenements a dark metaphor for the crumbling code of honour among thieves while the clinical futuristic sets of The Terminal Man added to the doom-laden atmosphere and narrative. The spaces here are equally fraught with tension; behind the glitz of the casino (actually a studio set in Germany) lies a never-ending play with mirrors. The warped reflections and refractions deny the spectator a fixed vantage point, and the untrustworthiness of Owen's voiceover further complicates our notion of the truth.
The nocturnal view of London is topographically unspecific; Jack lives "on the other side of the river", while there are a few fleeting glimpses of the glitzy West End, but instead the cramped interiors of the basement flat of the gleefully tacky, ersatz Vegas look of the casino are ironic counterpoints to the high-life that Jack ad his bosses purport to be living. Indeed, the film is an interesting counterpoint to Scorsese's Casino; there the casino is a hive of glamour, polyester suits and giddy tracking shots, whilst Hodges's austere mise-en-scène complements perfectly the grubby seediness of 'The Golden Lion'.
As the croupier, Owen's performance is a complex mixture of detached blankness and impotent action (his savage beating of an unruly punter is as animated as he gets), but with his steely gaze and sartorial elegance, it is easy to see why some people have been touting him as the next James Bond. Where the film falters is in its depiction of women - yes, we are offered three very different types (though all are emotionally unstable in some way) but Jack's relationship with them is never allowed to preclude Hodges's fascination with milieu and claustrophobic environments.
Also present is a sly ironic humour that underpins the seamier side of the narrative. From clever recurring images (Jack's trilby, his father's telephone calls) to a ghastly comic array of supporting players, the film blends a subtle humour with its implications. The chuckling casino manager reading 'I, Croupier' sums up the way he and most of the audience have been duped into being seduced by this tacky and trivial business.
Croupier is certainly a thriller that isn't afraid of taking its time, of eking out moments of tension. Indeed, so somnabulatory is its pace that when the flashes of violence occur, they all the stronger. The botched heist is less of a focal point as we have been led to believe; instead it functions as a way of tying together loose ends in a rather unconvincing way. There is sense that Hodges doesn't know (or isn't confident enough to know?) when to end Croupier - the multiple neat resolutions are a little pat, and Jack's moment of clarity (that although a non-gambler, he is still the person "with the power to make you lose") is accompanied by a rather clunking image of gambling chips swept into a black void. As a piece of manipulative film-making, the shot may not totally satisfy, but at least heralds some kind of return to form of a director whose sense of place and mood has been sadly neglected by our cinema establishment.
Reviewed by Ben McCann
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