Hard Eight (1996)
The movies have always loved the casinos. Casinos are endless sources of mystery and intrigue, of potential danger and romance. Everything most movies promise us in the first place. What did Godard say? All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun, or something to that effect. Casinos usually have plenty of girls, guns, and every other vice that a film or person could crave. Hard Eight, Paul Thomas Anderson’s first picture, shot when he was 24 (!), is a chamber piece, set in and around the casinos, that largely concerns three characters, Sydney (Philip Baker Hall), John (John C. Reilly) and, a little later, Clementine (Gwyneth Paltrow).
These characters make their livings off of the casinos, living the lives of sailors on land, but the interesting thing about the picture is how little of it is actually set in the casino. Anderson is interested more in the motel rooms, the cars, the phone booths, the little bits in between the more glamorous, photogenic playrooms. A cynic could say that the film was low budget and that this strategy is cheaper. The cynic would be right, and I would imagine that that did inform the film, but this fringe thing applies to the larger budget Anderson films too. Over the course of five films, Anderson has worked in a variety of genres, but his obsession has been constant: to take an established genre and use it as a way to splinter into the exploration of the nature of the (usually surrogate) family unit.
That’s in retrospect of course, no one knew what Hard Eight meant, or least meant in the grand scheme of its creator’s preoccupations, when it was released to little fanfare in 1996. The pleasure of Hard Eight is that it works in more than just a Spot the Hints of Greatness to Come kinda way. The film is terrific in its own right: surprising, original and quite moving. This is one of Anderson’s most restrained pictures, the emotions here are closer to the vest than every other Anderson film with the exception of his new one, but they ARE there, and that’s a bit of a shock for this kind of movie. Hard Eight promises you a Grifters type noir, and Anderson proves that he can play that game too when he wants, but he isn’t satisfied with that. He pushes deeper and strives for something emotionally fuller without going maudlin, and that’s the achivement of his debut film.
The most intriguing mystery of Hard Eight is Philip Baker Hall’s great, lined, broken poker face. Hall reminds me of one of those mysterious old men of a French crime movie, one of the guys that has to lead one last robbery, blah, blah. Sydney’s last robbery days are behind him though, and now he’s concerned with boring day to day living. Boring day to day living and John that is, a fairly dim bulb who, after rightful initial suspicion, takes to him as instant father figure, or, in Clementine’s words, like a puppy to his owner. John orders the same drinks as Sydney, tries to dress like Syndey, and fruitlessly tries to approximate Sydney’s unfakable world weary badassery.
After the characters are established in terrific (if occasionally mannered) hard Mametish dialogue, the film essentially turns into a black comic spoof of the Son Bringing Home a Friend the Father doesn’t approve of. This friend is Jimmy (Samuel L. Jackson) and he wears his crass entitlement the way Sydney wears his melancholy Man of a Past Era. The two instantly clash, and their meeting might be one of the sharpest scenes to still grace an Anderson film. Jimmy tells Sydney that he runs security in one of the nearby casinos, Sydney, in perfect underplayed timing, asks him if he’s responsible for the parking lot. Jimmy politely, defensively, corrects Sydney, but you can tell that he’s saving something for later.
Jimmy’s ultimate reprisal is unexpected and necessary for the structure of Hard Eight. Unexpected because Sydney has just worked through another complication, and we feel that it may be about time for the picture to close, necessary because Jackson’s thug is a needed shot of dangerous comic adrenaline. Anderson has always been a tinkerier with tone, and Jimmy shakes the film from the sad introspection of the second act. We need a bit of the live wire of Vegas and Jackson gives us precisely that, and the performance seems to me to be a precursor to Jackson’s hilarious, terrifying, underappreciated career best work in Jackie Brown.
Jimmy finally catches Sydney off guard and calls him on his hypocrisy, and the scene is shocking because Jimmy deflates many of the notions we’ve had about Sydney ourselves. Jimmy reduces Sydney to being just another hood who think’s he’s above it all, and we, after indulging in John’s hero worship, can’t help but see Jimmy’s point and understand his resentment. Jimmy is also key in revealing Sydney’s true nature, and this development elevates Hard Eight to something more than just a well turned genre film. When we reach the film’s beautiful final scene, we don’t look at Sydney as just another cool hood character, we see him as a terrified, reserved human being, tucking the messiness away for who knows how many more years.
★★★½
