Owning Mahowny Directed by Richard Kwietniowski Written by Maurice Chauvet and Richard Kwietniowski Starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Minnie Driver Classification: 14A Rating: ***½
Richard Kwietniowski's terrific Owning Mahowny, which opens today across Canada, is about the sordid mess that gambling can make of anybody's life.
But for a movie that treats so durable a Hollywood topic--for which see The Great Sinner with Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner, Bugsy, Martin Scorsese's Casino, and so on--this one is unusual in its artful dodging of just about every Hollywood cliché about the perils and wicked pleasures of the gaming life.
Don't expect babes-and-booze razzle dazzle. Don't look for a crazed salesman betting his baby's last diaper on the ponies, or hussies in scarlet garters luring nice business guys from Mississauga to their doom at a jimmied roulette wheel. This film describes, instead, the pathetic last days of a joyless gambler and bank robber who lives in Toronto, a city, as everyone knows, that was declared rhinestone-free many centuries ago.
Owning Mahowny is unusual, as such movies go, in its disregard for busy theatricality. Nothing much happens, not even a good stomach-churning car chase. (As the cops close in, the culprit's slow-speed attempted escape from justice ends when his clunker of a car sputters out of gas.) But the film is chiefly remarkable in its debt to intelligent theology, of which more presently.
Seconds into his moral tale, Kwietniowski introduces us to Bay Street banker Dan Mahowny (Philip Seymour Hoffman), whose comeuppance is drawing nigh.
Hoffman's character, incidentally, is based on that of a real thief and gambler who, in the high-rolling Reagonmic 1980s, swindled the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce out of some $10-million to support his habit.
Dan's gambling has long ago let his foible slip into devastating obsession. Lurking inside greedy institutions all the time--quietly bilking customers (notably an attractive millionette played by Sonja Smits) and conning his all-too-complicit bosses from a desk in the loans department of the bank, or slumped over the tables in Atlantic City or Las Vegas--has left him an inert, pasty-faced slob. That stupid look on his face makes you wonder what he's doing it all for.
Well, he does have a live-in girlfriend, a teller named Belinda (played by Minnie Driver, who dazedly meeps around as though she's been mugged by her blonde fright wig). But what Dan wants from her is anybody's guess. It's not sex. He doesn't want sex with anybody, even (or especially not) the complimentary hooker sent up to his room one night by a lizardy casino manager (excellent John Hurt). He doesn't want companionship, or a comfortable home life. Dan and Belinda's apartment looks downright embalmed. He doesn't want friends or a vacation or a suit from Harry Rosen. He has lost interest in all the ordinary things--sex, drink, good food, art, pleasant accomodations, human warmth--that make life on earth endurable.
In fact, the only thing in the world he wants is the tiny (and diminishing) thrill that sizzles up his spine when he discovers whether he's won or lost. This is where the theology comes in. Sin is the only word that really fits the thing Dan has saddled himself with. His gambling inclination is far too insidious and destructive to be human frailty. Nor is it a disease. Dan deeply wants to be the jerk he is, and, through long practice, he instantly resists every temptation to leave the tables and get a life. Gambling is a sin for Dan in the quite conventional sense that religious people give to the word: a delusional obsession with something--it can be anything--that ruins one's pleasure in everything other than itself, and eventually robs its victim of even that last little excitement.
Though set in Toronto, Atlantic City and Vegas, directed by an American, with a superb British, American and Canadian cast, Owning Mahowny truck me as a peculiarly Scandinavian film. For most of a century, great northern directors--one thinks of Victor Sjostrom ( The Wind) and Carl Theodor Dreyer ( Vampyr), Ingmar Bergman and, more recently, Erik Skjoldbjaerg ( Insomnia)--have created unforgettable portraits of men and women self-condemned by illusion. They know, as Hollywood and the fundamentalists keeps forgetting, that people like Dan don't suddenly slide into hell. They get there the only way anybody can: by working really hard at it. Special to The Globe and Mail