walking away
by Douglas Messerli
Frank Hannah and Wayne Kramer
(screenplay), Wayne Kramer (director) The
Cooler / 2003
To describe Bernie Lootz (William H.
Macy) as a loser is to misunderstand the meaning of the word. In order to lose
one has to have taken chances, failed in opportunities chosen. Lootz has let
his drunken wife carry off his son and passively allowed himself to be involved
in petty thievery, and finally been enveloped into the mob through his
“friendship” with Shelly Kaplow (Alec Baldwin), who, to cure Bernie of
gambling, has taken a baseball bat to Bernie’s knee, crippling him for life.
Bernie’s life has so spiraled downward (the camera shows him “going down” the
casino elevator at several points in the film) that he literally emanates
failure, the perfect “gift” for a casino “cooler,” a man who, standing even a
few feet from winners, immediately sours their luck, whether they are playing
the machines or gambling with dice. In one of the first lines of the film a
casino employee calls out: “Where’s Bernie, they’re killing us. Yeah, we need
him right away.”
Bernie, after having a cup of coffee—the creamer always seems to be
empty when he seeks to add any richness to his drink—walks to the table and
squelches the man’s luck.
At his run-down motel studio apartment, the plants have died and his cat
has run away. The neighbors keep him awake each night through sexual romps as
they whoop out their pleasures and rhythmically beat out their sexual actions
against the wall. Bernie is less a looser than a disaster; as Shelly later
describes him, “Lootz is kryptonite on a stick,” an explosion waiting to
happen.
For those numerous critics, accordingly, who disliked this film because
of being “pretty hokey,” they seem to miss the point. Despite Baldwin’s quite
brilliant tough-guy Actor’s Studio-like performance, Kramer’s film is pure
fantasy, having as much to do with reality as Las Vegas has to a suburban
neighborhood. If the film seems, from time to time, to create a mood of
film-noir, it is lit up with the lurid lighting of the Vegas strip. No need to
look too deeply into the shadows cinematographer James Whitaker has created.
Even Shelly, the loveable-hateable head honcho of decaying Shangri-La,
is, as the smart young gang Ivy-leaguers who argue for a complete makeover of
the casino, describe him, a museum piece, an old-timer who believes in the
values of the original Las Vegas, presumably the personal bullying he, time and
again, employs. No need for such an old-fashioned concept of a “cooler” for
them, just paint the walls a mute color, make sure the servers are
well-endowed, and play a musical score under which are woven the words: lose,
lose, lose. They offer Shelley an architectural rendering of what they see as
the new transformation, but Shelly believes that, behind his violent bullying
is at least the hope of a truly mystical world of eternal pleasure—in return of
which he takes in 135 million each year. His reaction to their kitschy vision
of the new Shangri-La is predictable:
Kaplow: [about the Vegas strip] What? You mean
that Disneyland
mookfest out there.
Huh? Come on, you know what that is?
Huh? That’s a
fucking violation is what that is. Something that
used to be
beautiful, used to have class, like a gorgeous high-priced
hooker with an
exclusive clientele. Then along comes that Steve
Wynn cocksucker and
knocks her up and puts her in a fucking
family way. Now
she’s nothing but a cheap, fat whore hiding
behind
too much fucking make-up. I look at her and see all her
fucking stretch marks, it makes me want to
cry—because I
remember the way she
used to be.
No matter how Satanic Shelly later
becomes, you gotta love a man who thinks like that!
We know, however, that, going against the current, as Shelly does, will
ultimately mean his end. He, as several of the film’s characters later point
out, is the real loser. Except for his inept gambling, Bernie never even tried
and is even now appreciative of his friend’s brutal act.
Yet Bernie, despite everything, still has hope, as deeply buried away as
it may be. At the beginning of the movie, almost having paid off his gambling
debt to Shelly, he is planning to simply “walk away,” to escape the world of no
clocks or windows, the world where there is no time or place in which to live.
Attracted to a young server, Natalie Belisario (Maria Bello), who at first
understandably ignores his kindness, he is suddenly amazed by her interest in
him. A sexual encounter is evidently his first in a very long time, and he can
hardly believe his “luck.” He is startled to discover her still with him in the
morning.
The relationship between the two gradually begins to deepen, each amazed
by the other’s gentleness and seemingly genuine feeling. The writers, however,
give Bernie another hit on the head when his no-good son Mikey (Shawn Hatosy)
and his lying girlfriend, Charlene (Estella Warren) suddenly show up, she
pregnant and the couple without money.
Always ready to play the smuck, Bernie gives them his only savings,
$3,000, which they immediately play at a Shangri-La table. Surprisingly, they
win, and Bernie’s attempt to cool them this time fails: he’s been having, as he
tells Shelley, “on and off” days.
To settle the situation, Shelly
politely asks the couple up for a drink in his office, code, as Bernie knows,
for the brutal attack in store for them. He has no choice but to intervene, as
Shelley begins beating Mikey. When he reveals that the kid is his son, Shelly
pounces, forcing him to pay hundreds of thousands for their lives and,
simultaneously, indenturing Bernie to him for several more years. Bernie agrees
to the ridiculous situation, but not before Shelley destroys both the boy’s
knees and kicks the pregnant girlfriend in her stomach to reveal a pillow
instead of a swollen womb.
Bernie should have known, clearly, there is no way to simply “walk
away.” Earlier in the film, the washed up lounge singer Buddy Stanford (Paul
Sorvino), after getting his fix, describes to Shelly an animal show he has seen
numerous times where the head lion, as he ages, his ousted by younger members
of the pride, forcing him to go alone in the jungle and die. If only he could
have known, Buddy whimpers, if only he could have walked away to die proudly.
Knowing that the upper brass would have killed him, Shelly gives the drug
addict a murderous dose, allowing him to leave without even knowing it. Yet
there is clearly no way, once one is involved with the mob, of simply “walking
off.”
Despite Bernie’s new problems, however, he and Natalie grow closer,
vowing their love to one another. When Natalie is distressed about her looks,
Bernie responds: “Hey. You look in the mirror, you don’t like what you see,
don’t believe it. Look in my eyes. I am the only mirror you’re ever gonna need.
You look in my eyes, Nathalie.”
As the days pass, so too does Bernie change. The costume designers
describe how in the early scenes, Macy was dressed in overlarge sizes that were
gradually replaced with more fitting outfits, shirts and ties of more appealing
colors. Lighting and make-up gradually turn Bernie into a joyful being. Bernie
smiles, almost sings to himself. He now has no effect whatsoever on winners. He
is himself suddenly a winner in life. Even his cat returns.
Noting the changes, Shelly calls in Nathalie, who reveals she has fallen
in love with Bernie; he warns her away, and for a few hours she leaves, Bernie
accepting the handwritten note with the tired forbearance he has greeted all
else in his life. She soon returns, however, and his luck grows even stronger.
Both are determined, despite their recognition of the near impossibility of the
act, to walk away.
A visit to Natalie by Shelly
and his henchman, send her crashing into the mirror she was told by Bernie to
ignore, badly cutting her face. When Bernie returns home, she reveals to him
that she has been paid to be nice to Bernie, Shelly hoping to keep him in
Vegas. Nathalie also admits, however, that she has truly fallen in love,
handing over the $3,000 she has been paid by Shelley so that she and Bernie
might go off together.
Bernie pays a visit to Shelly to tell him of his plans, promising him to
continue the payments, so honest is this now lucky man. Yet, Shelly makes clear
to him that he will never get away, that if he walks he must die.
As he is about to return to the waiting Natalie, Bernie suddenly decides
to gamble with the money, staking everything, once more, on a game of luck. No
longer a “cooler,” Bernie is suddenly hot. He wins, wins big, with Shelley
forced to attempt the role as the cooler. Returning to Nathalie, Bernie drives
off, quite literally, into the sunset. But some ways out of town he must stop,
vomiting up all the fear he has swallowed and revealing to her their big
winnings.
If it is hard to perceive what Bernie has pulled off as a crime, one
must remember that winning such amounts is, nonetheless, treated as a crime in
world in which he and Natalie lived. A cop suddenly comes up to the car, orders
them out, forces them to their knees and is about to shoot them dead, Shelly
and his cronies waiting in a nearby car. Amazingly—one must remember that this
film is pure fantasy—a drunken driver, passing by, crashes into both the
waiting car and the cop, killing everyone except the doomed couple, who now
truly can walk away.
Back in Las Vegas, the Ivy-League mobster, Larry Sokolov, speaks:
“Gentlemen, I want to thank you for your vote of confidence. As the new
director of the casino operations I want to make a personal guarantee to each
and every one of you that your investment in the Golden Shangri-La will be well
looked after. The future looks very bright, gentleman. Very, very bright.”
Crime has paid off, apparently, for everyone.
Los Angeles, September 2, 2012
Reprinted from International Cinema Review (September 2012).
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