Stuck Inside #3: Hard Eight
There’s nothing quite like watching a person who appears to be totally confident in whatever situation they find themselves in. A person whose serenity effortlessly puts you at ease. We find such a person in Phillip Baker Hall’s Sydney, a professional gambler looking to do a good deed. Sydney knows his limitations — and the limitations of his profession. He can’t work miracles, but he can at least pull someone up from rock bottom and get them floating again. Sydney extends this courtesy to the destitute John (John C. Reilly), whom he finds down on his luck seated on the ground outside a coffee shop. After coffee, a cigarette, and a bit of coaxing, Sydney convinces John to travel to Vegas and take a shot at something beyond moping. Two years later, John is doing quite alright for himself as Sydney’s acolyte.
We will later find that the liking Sydney takes to John wasn’t quite the spur-of-the-moment bit of altruism we were led to believe, but it doesn’t quite diminish the relationship between the two. Sydney grows to view John as a son and extends the unconditonal love to him that only a parent can. Both Sydney and John take a liking (though Sydney’s is once again a more parental affection) to Gwyneth Paltrow’s Clementine, a down-on-her-luck casino waitress/hooker with a heart of…not quite gold — let’s say bronze. It seems the two are attracted to the same fuck-up quality in her that makes them such a pair.
Despite being the feature debut of a 25 year-old, Hard Eight instantly establishes Paul Thomas Anderson as one of the best actor directors in Hollywood. Perhaps it’s because Anderson also writes his films that he is able to coach the performances his messy, complicated, fascinating characters require. Philip Baker Hall gives such an understated, subtle perfomance to level out the energy rippling under the surface of his scene mates. Paltrow is so good here – remember when she used to be an actress, like a really good one? Though the material requires her to go big in certain moments, most of the work is done with her eyes, which have the diminished sparkle of a wounded soul. Reilly is already nailing the manchild helplessness that will later acquit him so well in later PTA and Adam McKay films. Jimmy is a loudmouth played by Samuel L. Jackson who brings an unsettling dirtbag charm and menace to the movie and makes me wish he was in more PTA films. And then, of course, there’s that scene-stealing Philip Seymour Hoffman popping up for two minutes just to remind us he’s one of the all-time greats.
PTA takes familiar elements from old noir stories and alters them to tell a story we’ve seen before in a different way. Down the stretch, every character makes a choice or two that goes against type and becomes all the more compelling. Just when we start to think of Sydney as a docile old gambler, we find out he used to be a killer (and still is. We think John is just a soft-hearted fool, until he’s pistol-whipping a man and slapping his new bride. Clementine turns out to be less a victim of circumstance and more a self-saboteur. And Jimmy who we think might just be a nuisance who fucks up the vibe evolves into a genuine threat in an instant. This is all serves to make a film that’s sweet and ugly, tender and violent. A small character piece about how pride can get the best of all of us.