alice_confetti

When I visited Las Vegas for the first time this year it was overwhelming. I thought it would be fun and glamorous. I also thought I knew what it meant to gamble. I grew up going to the racetrack with my grandparents and my dad - eating a nice lunch, enjoying the flowers and sunshine, looking at the beautiful horses, and betting a little money (usually I lost, but I wasn't betting much, so who cared?) In my family betting meant two things - for the women (my grandma, my sister, and me) it meant various levels of disinterest and betting a few dollars on each race, for the men (my grandpa, my dad, my uncle) it meant studying the racing form and reading books on racing statistics. It was a hobby for them, they took it seriously, and my dad always broke about even every season (a tricky feat to accomplish).

For some stupid reason, based on the movies I guess, I thought Vegas would be filled with people wearing evening gowns and tuxedos and smoking cigarettes in long, thin holders. I think I pictured it more like how Monte Carlo looks in old movies. In reality it's filled with ordinary people in clothes suited for backyard barbecues sitting at slot machines. It's more depressing during the day - try getting trapped in a casino at 2 PM (they're impossible to find your way out of) with constant smoke and grubbiness and not wanting to run the hell out of LV. At night, it's slightly better - there's the Bellagio Fountain which is kind of fun, but then you get the packs of 20-something girls and the packs of 20-something guys. All dressed up and trying to look cool as they get drunker and stupider. Everyone is trying to be something they're not.

And then there's the gambling. I found myself in the course of three days becoming addicted to roulette. Why, I don't know. I thought I could break even or win a little money, maybe. I spent hours, sometimes with friends, sometimes alone, sitting at roulette tables. I would be up and then I would be down hoping to get back up again. I, who have no money and mountains of student loans ended up losing about $150 and feeling like an idiot. It was really hard to quit when I did, too.

Games of chance are more addicting than games of skill. With horse racing I never knew what I was doing so I never cared. I expected to lose so I bet $2 a race and liked watching the horses in the paddock. At roulette I had this blind, irrational hope that fate would smile on me. It was insane, but that's how it felt when I won. When I lost, it was proof that the world was against me, but maybe it would change its mind. Maybe I could be lucky.

Anyway, that long-winded description is for a movie I watched last night, Croupier. It stars Clive Owen as Jack Manfred - a writer who gets drawn back into the world of gambling when his dad (a professional gambler and professional casino worker) gets him a job at a London casino called the Golden Lion. Jack never goes into much about his past as he narrates the film, but we come to realize that his dad has a gambling addiction, and Jack might have had one too. He's both attracted and repelled by the casino. He says he's addicted to watching other people lose. In the beginning of the film he never takes chances, only watches others. He says repeatedly during the film that he "never gambles" but the longer he works at the Golden Lion, the riskier he becomes. Eventually he's mixed up with a few women (one of them is Alex Kingston of ER and Moll Flanders fame and she's just great in this) and is involved in a plot to rob the casino.


Jack observes a friendly game

It's sort of a light souffle of a movie, a caper film where there main character isn't in on the caper's secrets, but what it gets right is how depressing and also addictive casinos can be, all at the same time. Jack observes everything coolly - the poor addicted losers, the rich women and their gigolos, the Eastern businessmen, and his fellow screwed-up croupiers - but he's never as detached as he claims.

Early in the movie Jack's girlfriend Marian (the lovely Gina McKee) tells him, "You're an enigma." In his interior voice-over he replies, "Not an enigma. A contradiction." He's smart enough to know when he's doing something stupid. He does it anyway, almost to flaunt his stupidity - to prove that others are stupider than him, meaner and more venal. Even when he willfully commits his dumbest actions, he tries to reason it out - to play the best and smartest odds of his stupidity. At the end of the film, when he realizes just how badly he's been had, he smiles and laughs - appreciating his manipulator's brilliance and ruthlessness. This movie is less about how "the house always wins" and more about how we are our own worst enemies - convincing ourselves that we can play the odds even as we know that we can't.