I guess this is more or less a movie review, because I’ll be giving my opinions on how I thought the film was executed. Let me first give a small disclaimer by saying that I was completely unaware that this movie was a remake from 1974, which means that I’ll be talking about the remake in and of itself.
While the premise and the events of the movie themselves were average and unconvincing at times, Mark Wahlberg actually gave a great performance as Jim Bennett (raising the movie as a whole), a literature teacher at presumably a major university during the day, but a trouble-seeking gambler by night. When I say gambler, I don’t mean the kind of charismatic guys you see throughout the Ocean’s trilogy or James Bond putting his shades on and walking away after saying “put it all on black.” Jim Bennett is an addict, and just like a majority of addicts who bet everything on their next visit to Las Vegas, they walk away with nothing. Jim loses all of his money multiple times, even when he’s up half a million or even two and a half million. Not only does he lose everything, but he actually falls in a $260,000 hole to the owner of an under the table Korean gambling ring and two loan-sharks.
The one scene where you could hear everyone openly disapprove of Bennett was when his mother gave him the money to pay (he was born into a rich family), but he ended up gambling it all away on a day out with Amy Phillips (Brie Larson), one of his literature students. While most people in the theater lacked the faintest notion as to why he would do such a thing (besides him having a problem), I knew exactly why he gambled it.
Bennett was born into the perfect situation. “Birth, education, intelligence, talent, looks. What’s wrong with you—you got brain damage,” says John Goodman’s character. Being born into such a high class, and even owning a big house from his own job, Bennett not only sees no value in money because it’s always available to him, but no value in life. Throughout most of his life, he took advantage of the safety net of ancestral wealth to get himself into trouble, simply because he could. The only thing he tried to do of his own merit was write and publish a failed novel, being reminded by a number of characters that he’s so harsh on the “all or nothing” mentality in his classroom because of his own failure. He finds himself in holes because he doesn’t want to pay his debts, knowing that he had any sort of crutch assisting him in doing so. He wants to pay it back through his own methods—gambling. He brings his earnings to gamble, hoping to earn his own money to pay off, but he looses everything, ends up owing, and the vicious cycle continues.
Bennett even treats his own personal life the same way he treats money—he doesn’t find value in it, walking around with a death wish and either using or completely ignoring everyone around him. He is well aware that he is an awful person due to the result of his personal failures and he makes it known to people through either brutal honesty, or through the result of his lies. He even takes the potential love interest in his student for granted “I want real love, a real thing to do every day, and I would rather die if I don’t get it.” He says arguably the line of the movie (in competition with Goodman’s cold delivery of “If I give you this money and you don’t pay me back, I will kill your entire bloodline—do you understand the gravity of this situation?”) without realizing that a level of happiness is sitting right across the table in Brie Larson. It only takes her receiving death threats and him being beaten by the loan-shark and his crew for Bennett to realize that he actually has a relationship with sentimental value in his life. After repaying all of his debts by finally winning the generic “put it all on black” situation, he runs all the way to Amy’s apartment to show his true appreciation.
What is the moral of the Gambler? It doesn’t matter how old you are, Brie Larson is totally worth it.
Ian Barbour