Mike Hodges (1998)
This British crime drama (aka ‘neo-noir’) is narrated by its protagonist in the third person. Jack Manfred (Clive Owen) is a writer but can’t get published. To make ends meet, he takes a job as a croupier in a London casino. Jack’s voiceover comprises passages from the novel he is writing – about Jake, a croupier in a London casino. The voiceover frames the story that Mike Hodges is telling on screen – the story of Jack, or is it Jake? How much of the action in Croupier describes Jack the croupier’s life? How much of it represents Jack the writer’s imagination?
Croupier is smart and stylish but Paul Mayersberg’s script, from the word go, is self-consciously clever. This has both a distancing and a distracting effect. The opening sequence takes place, like many to follow, in the casino but what goes on at the roulette table is upstaged by the fancy words of the accompanying voiceover:
‘Now he had become the still centre of that spinning wheel of misfortune. The world turned round him, leaving him miraculously untouched. The croupier had reached his goal. He no longer heard the sound of the ball. …’
Jack goes for the casino job at the urging of his father, from the other end of a telephone line. Jack Sr (Nicholas Ball) is in South Africa, where his son was raised and acquired experience as a croupier in Sun City, the country’s gambling capital. Jack Sr talks big about his latest business ventures but when the phone call ends he returns to his work as a humble barman (or that’s what we see him do – which could be what his son imagines). Jack Jr impresses the casino manager (Alexander Morton) at interview and as an employee but is soon ignoring house rules. He doesn’t shop Matt (Paul Reynolds), a fellow croupier who Jack knows is on the fiddle. It’s against casino policy to have personal relationships with either colleagues or clientele but Jack sleeps with fellow croupier Bella (Kate Hardie), then with Jani (Alex Kingston), who gambles in the casino.
It’s Jani, a South African in London, who encourages the affair. She also tells Jack about her serious gambling debts, blaming a black eye and bandaged hand on her creditors, and asks him to be the inside man for a raid on the casino – ten grand upfront, another ten grand if the robbery goes according to plan. Jack doubts Jani’s story, especially once he notices her injuries have suddenly disappeared, but he accepts the proposition. In the meantime, his relationship with his girlfriend Marion (Gina McKee), a former WPC now working as a store detective, is on the skids. Marion doesn’t like either the evidence of Jack’s other women – Bella turns up at his flat to blame him for getting her the sack – or the character of the heartless croupier, which Marion assumes to be a self-portrait of Jack, in his draft novel. They patch things up but Marion picks up a phone message left for Jack that the robbery is on for Christmas Eve. She deletes the message and contacts a former Met colleague. Police arrive at the casino in time to prevent the robbery.
Although the casino and Jack’s poky basement flat are very different in terms of physical scale, Mike Hodges and his cinematographer Michael Garfath give these spaces a unifying claustrophobia. Croupier conveys a sustained sense of life underground – the flat and the casino both below street level, Jack’s tube journeys, the fact that he eventually publishes his novel anonymously. The sequences in which the camera focuses on the gambling tables are rhythmically edited by Les Healey. Jack at work there has something of the magician about him and the choreography of inanimate objects – chips, cash, and so on – is beguiling to watch even if (like me) you know next to nothing about roulette or blackjack.
By far the best reason to watch the film (showing in the Mike Hodges retrospective at BFI) is Clive Owen. He’d made an impression several years previously in Stephen Poliakoff’s Close My Eyes (1991) but Croupier, which it seems got more attention in America than in Britain, was his international breakthrough. As Jack, Owen is physically imposing but shows a fascinating emotional flexibility: the character’s cynical, laconic cool is sometimes pierced by hints of vulnerability or – in one of the film’s best scenes, when Jack listens to Jani’s proposition – eager curiosity. It’s at moments like these that the idea of Jack’s dual nature – a character in a drama and the author of it – comes to life. Of the three contrasting women in Jack’s life, Alex Kingston is the strongest presence but all three actresses are effective. Some of the supporting male roles, though, are crudely played, by Nicholas Ball, Paul Reynolds and Nick Reding, as Jack’s publisher.
Jack sees the world as made up of two kinds of people – gamblers and croupiers. He doesn’t gamble, and takes every opportunity to let others know that. While others are addicted to gambling, he’s addicted to watching gamblers lose, or so he says in his narration: this potentially interesting theme is hardly reflected in the action on screen. The plotting is occasionally clumsy. Marion’s intercepting the all-important answerphone message feels improbably convenient (wouldn’t Jack have made more leakproof arrangements for receiving the tip-off?) Still more convenient is her getting killed on the night of the robbery. According to the Met detective (Tom Mannion) whom she contacted – and who, as he and Jack stand by her corpse in the police morgue, bizarrely adds that he was in love with Marion – she died in a suspected revenge-killing-hit-and-run. You suspect, rather, that it’s Mike Hodges and Paul Mayersberg who need to get Marion out of the way.
Jack’s novel, ‘I, Croupier’, is a (surprising) best-seller but he continues working in the casino and living in his subterranean flat. Jani, back in South Africa, phones to thank Jack for the part he played in the robbery that never was and to tell him her own money troubles are over. She then hands the phone to her husband-to-be – Jack Sr, who tells his son that he set up the croupier job to set in train the robbery. Like Jani, Jack Sr did well financially out of this non-event. Jack Jr hangs up with a stunned smile on his face. Bella emerges from the bedroom and kisses him. The voiceover sums things up:
‘So that was it. The final card. Blackjack. His father, eight thousand miles and twenty seven years away, was still dealing to his son Jack from the bottom of the deck … but Jake the croupier had a sense of humour.’
Croupier’s twist in the tale isn’t much of a surprise. It was clear from the start that the omniscient storyteller wasn’t Jack Manfred but Paul Mayersberg.
11 May 2022
