3 hours ago
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The vast emptiness of luxury hotels is part of the mystery and spectacle of Edward Berger’s intriguing if static and overwrought psychological drama-thriller; it is about a desperate chancer and gambling addict, faced with the metaphysical crisis of renewing or annulling his existence by staking everything on a single bet. Screenwriter Rowan Joffe adapts the 2014 novel by Lawrence Osborne, whose title is ironic. He would not have these problems if he really was a small player. He is a big player and a big loser, although his smallness comes through in other ways.
Colin Farrell plays a professional gambler who styles himself “Lord Doyle”, adrift in the Chinese gambling mecca of Macau, the Asian Vegas; he is a despised “gweilo” or foreign ghost. Farrell shows us a seedy guy with an outrageously spivvy moustache and a flop sweat, running up a massive bill at the kind of five-star establishment which tolerates this sort of thing on the tacit understanding that the guest will bet and lose massively at the hotel casino. Doyle never lets the staff in to clean his room so wakes up hungover every morning in an accumulating chaos.
One night, while waiting for his unlucky streak to end at the baccarat table, Doyle encounters the coolly charismatic Dao Ming (Fala Chen), one of the unofficial “brokers” or moneylenders who haunt the tables. Their transaction is calamitous, and yet Doyle prevents Dao Ming from being beaten up by the widow of a gambler she has driven to suicide. They become friends, or even spiritual lovers, an affair between two phantoms – but in having a certain mysterious number, Doyle has – ambiguously – been given the means of his own redemption or destruction, forced to confront his own destiny as a “hungry ghost”, always gobbling and never sated.
It is an elegant and intriguing contrivance, although Tilda Swinton has a frankly preposterous part as Betty, a cartoony woman who is pursuing Doyle and knows his terrible secret back in the UK; her character and plot-purpose are neither convincing in any realist sense or particularly funny. Perhaps it would have been better to develop Dao Ming’s persona instead.
Berger and his cinematographer James Friend charge the screen with florid panoramas of Macau and its hazy waterfront, and also with exotic, sinister interiors; the world of the hotels, with their synthesised grandeur and cavernous spaces where anonymity is liberating and oppressive. It’s a movie of big moods and grand gestures, undercut by the banal inevitability of losing.
