Lucky You

dir: Curtis Hanson
[img_assist|nid=734|title=I bet you $500 that I'm going to sleep with you eventually|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=300|height=375]
I have, as a film geek obsessive, certain film obsessions that trump even all the others I posses (beyond samurai flicks, heist flicks, flicks with zombies, boobs or explosions, of course). For reasons not immediately apparent to me, flicks about gambling and gamblers appeal to me immensely.

I’ve never been a gambler myself, but only because I know I have an addictive personality (hence the film geekdom), and because I’ve barely got enough money to waste on food, booze, rent and childcare, let alone to lose at the poker tables. It is perhaps the high-stakes tension that appeals, or the self-destructive characters these stories inevitably conjure with. Whatever the elements, I dig them big time, and am a keen watcher of films about these chronic fuckups.

Films like Owning Mahoney, which followed the true story of a bank employee who stole millions from his employer and lost it all at the tables, or High Roller, the story of Stu ‘The Kid’ Unger, who could win hundreds of thousands of dollars through poker in a day, but never remember to pay his electricity bill, have the added value of being true stories. But the real appeal is watching these people, with an almost horrified fascination, piss their lives away. In that sense it’s not too different from flicks about drug addiction, because they depend on that same tension, that same viewing of a car crash in slow motion, to see people compulsively acting in ways they know are killing them and the people around them.

Other flicks like Rounders, The Hustler, The Cincinnati Kid and plenty of others show that the way these games are played, and the actions of the various characters, are a revelation of character itself, or the profound lack thereof.

Lucky You is a somewhat tamer depiction of these themes, but it nonetheless carries the same weight, though it offsets itself with the standard copout of “well, it’s all justifiable as long as they win in the end.”

Er, no, it’s not. The actions of compulsively selfish arseholes rarely work out that well for the people around them, no matter the final result.

Huck (the always great Eric Bana), is a professional poker player who generally does pretty well at the tables of Las Vegas, and is trying to scratch together enough of a roll to enter a poker tournament. He plays the other players, and not the cards, which every flick of this ilk tells us is the key to winning. In one memorable scene he outplays an arrogant prick without even looking at his own cards first.

The one person who can ruin his day is his father, L.C. (the often great Robert Duvall), who can change Huck’s luck just by entering the room.

So, really, it’s not about gambling; it’s about people with daddy issues.

The daddy issues keep coming and going, woven through the fabric of the film, as Huck’s clear resentment of his father colours all his actions. His abandonment at Daddy’s hands fuels his own career choice and path of… well, I think you get the idea.

And though he usually treats women like shit, because an actress played by Drew Barrymore comes along, he starts re-evaluating his life in the face of her work helping him deal with his father issues. Oh, that’s in between stealing from her.

Though Huck is by nature a pretty closed off person, requiring Bana to tell a lot of his story through just veiled eyes and body language, you get the idea that he’s a pretty unlikeable individual. Gambling is his entire life, and he doesn’t seem to have anything else going for him except for his constant momentum. I don’t really remember him sleeping that often, and I don’t remember feeling too bad when various people beat the crap out of him.

Whenever L.C. comes into a scene, there’s a palpable tension and almost a guilty maliciousness towards his son, a kind of need to one-up even though he knows how poorly he treated the boy and his now dead mother. They often end up exchanging Huck’s mum’s wedding ring, as a heavily weighted chip from both of their shoulders, either through games or through loans.

The game as played, which is mostly Texas Hold ‘em, is pretty reasonably well treated, as are the players. A lot of actual high-stakes professional players are peppered through the film to give it some authenticity. The thing about watching people like Daniel Negreanu, Eric Lindgren or Minh Ly in a movie like this is, you can’t help but wonder whether they were playing real games in between the fake games to be able to scratch their itch.

You could say that the games themselves, and the way they’re handled, are far superior to many of the dramatic elements, since Huck is a soulless, empty individual, and his relationships with any of the other characters are somewhat unbelievable, but I wouldn’t say that. I think it builds up to give the ending enough of a hint of emotional resonance in order to make the long journey there feel a bit more worthwhile.

There is a quite humorous section where Huck, out of desperation, agrees to a proposition bet in order to get his $10,000 stake for the tournament. It involves running five miles in 40 degree temperatures and playing 18 holes of golf within the space of a few hours, necessitating a level of desperate fumbling not seen since the first time most people had sex. It’s a bit of a diversion, but at least it’s used to show how pathetic Huck is to get into these kinds of situations, and how nasty a piece of work he is when he turns on Barrymore’s character, expecting her to be as mercenary as he is.

The build-up to the tournament feels interminable much of the time, since we know he’ll get there, and the various obstacles thrown in his path are just killing time until that fateful 45 minute stretch comes along. After all, there are only so many scenes we can handle being reminded of how Drew Barrymore has gone straight from goofy sex kitten to middle-aged scold without the interceding bit. Good on her for doing charity work with her spare time in-between Charlie’s Angels sequels.

It’s not a great gambling film, but there’s enough there for fans of the genre or of poker to get their teeth into. There are too few repercussions for the protagonist for me to see this as successful on the character front. He starts off a self-centred jerk and ends up a self-centred jerk, except he’s resolved to no longer exist in his father’s copious shadows.

Gee, that should improve his selfishness by 450 per cent.

Maybe there’s some resolution at the end, no redemption, and it’s debatable whether it’s earned or not. Ultimately, despite the blankness of Huck and the superficiality of what a nasty place Vegas truly is, I still enjoyed it enough not to want to pluck my eyes out in anticipation of dealing with my own Oedipal issues one day.

7 times when they’re talking about rivers, flops, bullets and pocket kings, they’re not talking about vibrators out of 10

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“You want sympathy? You'll find it between "shit" and "syphilis" in the dictionary.” – Lucky You.