“Fuck.”
That is is the first line delivered by a weary, hungover, and anxious Colin Farrell at the beginning of Edward Berger’s frantic and surprisingly emotional drama, Ballad of a Small Player. His hotel room is in complete shambles: several room service carts parked askew; clothes strewn about. You can tell that it smells of stale cigarettes and liquor. After his chamber thriller, Conclave, and epic war drama, All Quiet on the Western Front, Berger dips his toe into a volatile exploration of a man haunted by his own vices and addictions.
Farrell’s Lord Doyle is in a bit of a sticky situation. First of all, he’s not actually a Lord. Whenever he goes down to gamble, he sports a color suit jacket with a pair of pale mustard leather gloves that he claims he found washed up on the shore while avoiding eye contact with the entire hotel staff and all of the concierges. Doyle is actually on the run after defrauding some old ladies out of money, but his escapades keep shoving him deeper and deeper in debt. His tab at the hotel and alone carries an IOU of over three hundred and fifty Hong Kong dollars, and that must be paid before the end of the long weekend otherwise the authories will become involved. Oh, and Tilda Swinton’s Cynthia Blithe is chasing after him for a different lump sum of money.
Doyle is convinced that his luck is about to change, and he prefers to play a game known as Baccarat. Each player is dealt only two cards and the one whos closer to nine is the winner. It’s a quick game with easy rules–almost as if Doyle prefers this because his losses will come quickly and he can pick himself back up before making another bet. When he loses a lot of cash in a private Baccarat game, Doyle propositions Fala Chen’s Dao Ming, a casino employee, to cut a deal with him. As he descends into deeper debt and tried to evade capture, Doyle becomes more emotionally untethered, hallucinating dangerous fates and considering suicide.
Berger begins his film flushing the screen with neon reds, pinks, and greens (cinematographer James Friend won his first Oscar for All Quiet) and highlights the darkly comic aspects of this story. It’s almost as if we are still on the high from the previous night’s big wins and we head down into the casinos without knowing when we should stop. As Doyle’s situation becomes more dire, that palette slips away and we circle in closer to Doyle’s head. Winning at gambling is about highs and lows, so the visuals bounce to and fro as Doyle’s psyche becomes more and more manic.
Farrell flexes so many muscles as he leans into absurdity and black comedy before completely unraveling in the final moments. He hurls himself into this role, and it will surely rank amongst his very best with Doyle’s sweaty desperation almost outrunning his humanity. It’s a blissfully berserk turn. Lisy Christl’s colorful costuming of Doyle truly honors how he wants to be perceived while Swinton sports some fantastic duds. Her last long-sleeved blouse is quite dramatic. Volker Bertelmann’s blaring score highlights the grandeur of trying to win it big. The sound design of those yellow gloves slowly bending up with each hand is a great comedic punctuation with so much emotion on the line.
With Farrell fearlessly tearing into his first collaboration with Berger, you cannot help but want to get into the game.
Ballad of a Small Player debuts in select theaters on October 15 and premiere exclusively on Netflix on October 29.
