Ballad of a Small Player

3 outta 5

Ballad of a Small Player seems to be about a degenerate gambler, lost in a nation that isn’t his own but then it starts throwing out ghosts and so forth. But another fantastic performance by Colin Farrell makes the odd turns endurable. It is like Farrell’s performance as the Penguin as he is a lot of sweaty energy, just with a less crazy accent. He still bounces in between accents here, from an incredibly bad fake English accent to his Irish natural accent as his gambler becomes more unhinged. The plot may devolve into nonsense, but Farrell keeps it interesting.

Gambler Riley (Farrell) is staying at a casino in Macau, pretending to be a British aristocrat named Lord Barger. But he is in debt to the hotel and looking to score cash. He plays the card game baccarat and finds a nice woman, Dao Ming (Fala Chen) who is also a loan shark. There is another player, an old lady only known as Grandma (Deanie Ip) who says that loaning cash to Riley would be a waste of time, but Dao and Riley come closer together. The scenes of her explaining to him about Chinese culture and the Festival of Hungry Ghosts is fairly cliché as the Westerner is enlightened by Asian mysticism. But Riley is being tracked down by a private investigator, Cynthia Blithe (Tilda Swinton), as he stole a bunch of money from a woman in the UK. So he tries to get back the cash the only way he knows how, by gambling. And surprisingly he starts winning, a lot. So much that the casinos think he has otherworldly help, so he sets up a huge game of baccarat for everything at once.

The finale hinges on a visceral match of baccarat. James Bond plays baccarat, however in the film of Casino Royale it was changed to poker as poker was getting a lot of hype at the time. Poker seems more cinematic with all the flushes and face cards, and baccarat is just about numbers equaling nine. However, director Edward Berger (Conclave) pulls it off with visually intense close-ups of Riley’s sweaty brows and showing the cards slowly being bent. Riley is wearing racing gloves the whole time, which makes him look like a race car driver. By the end, Riley is facing off against one of his associates, Lippett (Alex Jenning). Earlier in the film, Lippett says that Riley isn’t ruthless enough to pretend to be an English aristocrat. When Lippett arrives for a confrontation smirking, it has some dramatic oomph. Not a lot, but enough.

When the casino owners think that Riley is being assisted by a ghost, it is a weird plot turn. The whole bit is about Hungry Ghosts as Riley is having visions of his mouth getting large and ghost-like, and then he’s binge eating to the point of vomiting. All of his gambling and indulgence is him becoming a Hungry Ghost, but it just feels dopey. Riley suddenly being affected by the supernatural is too much of a curve in a movie that is mostly just about darkly funny bits of degenerate gambling.

Farrell holds the entire movie together, as there’s long stretches of him staggering around and looking desperate. He portrays the twitchiness of an addict very excellently, and when someone tells him that he’s a gambling addict he becomes defensive. The film opens with his Lord Doyle act and Farrell has such a deliberately awful English accent, it’s an easy way to spot this guy as a fraud. There is a fun bit when he fast talks the hotel about getting money from his accounts in England, which they don’t believe.

When the private investigator first finds him, she tries to awkwardly take a photo of him in an elevator. She badly lies and runs away until he catches up and takes her phone. He then promises to gamble and pay her off, until she walks away disgusted. Since she needs proof that he’s alive, the next time she just walks up to him with a digital camera and takes a picture. The scene when she tells him that he stole cash from a woman who trusted him with her investments shows how much of a scumbag he is. Another fun character is Grandma as she mercilessly smack talks him the whole time, as she is old and she doesn’t care what anyone says.

He starts to grow a conscience when he spends time with Dao Ming, and Chen is effective at the emotional bits where she tells him about how she let down her mother with her gambling and stealing. But the twists with her in the finale manages to be both dramatically unsatisfying and also confusing. There’s a bunch of nicely composed shots of Riley in the end where it seems like he might finally be free of his gambling addiction, but it seems like sort of tacked on to give it a sorta happy ending. Ballad of a Small Player gets some points for being weird, and Farrell is reliably great, and while this film may not come together in a satisfying manner, it manages to be unique.