‘Ballad of a Small Player’: Colin Farrell Gambles It All Away

Many gambling addicts will tell you that it’s not the opportunity of winning a fortune that keeps them chronically hitting for another card, rolling another pair of dice, watching another little ball go round and round until it stops on the red or the black. It’s the thrill of losing that feeds the monkey on their back.

And it’s clear, from the moment you meet Lord Freddy Doyle, that this man is a world-class loser. Do not let the dashing green velvet suit, the yellow leather gloves, the silk cravat or the pencil-thin mustache, a tonsorial touch that suggests the matinee idols of yesteryear, fool you. The same goes for the name and title of nobility, neither of which are really his. Doyle merely projects the aura of wealth and taste, two things he does not possess. What this gentleman trawling his way through the casinos of Macau, one unpaid bill and card-room ban at a time, does have is a talent for fucking up. In that respect, he’s about to score big-time.

As played by Colin Farrell with an Olympian level of flop-sweat desperation, Doyle is the antihero of Ballad of a Small Player, Edward Berger’s adaptation of John Osbourne’s 2014 novel. The Oscar-nominated actor is technically the lead, though he’s not the real star — that would be Macau itself, the “Las Vegas of Asia” that seems invented with the primary purpose of being filmed in Technicolor. Watch the cameras fly through its blindingly lit-up streets, over its dazzlingly reflective skyscrapers and blinking signs, and through its sensory-overload gaming dens, filled with every color the human retina can detect, and you can see why this Mecca for gamblers deserves top billing. It’s a cliché to call a city a character, but Berger’s movie most definitely makes Macau the antagonist. This place eats small players who think they’re high rollers for brunch. (This goes without saying, but: Netflix is putting this fall release in theaters — hopefully near you! — for a brief run starting October 15th, before it begins streaming on October 29th. Trust us, you’ll really want to see its vision of hell on a big screen.)

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Doyle’s first choice for a game of chance is Macao, a cutthroat endeavor in which a dealer gives two players two cards. Whoever gets the closest total to a nine wins. In other words, a perfect way to piss away whatever winnings you’ve accrued in record time, which makes it the perfect past time for Doyle. It’s in one of the few Macao rooms where this faux-arisotcrat can still get credit that he meets Dao Ming (Fala Chen). She’s a freelance creditor, which is a fancy term for a loan shark with stratospheric interest rates. Doyle doesn’t take the bait. Later, when a body plummets past his hotel room window, he discovers that the man was one of her clients. He didn’t pay up before he went down, so now Dao has to pick up the debt.

In a moment of kindness, or maybe it’s simply one more delusion among a legion of them, Doyle offers to settle it for her. Never mind that he still owes his hotel $325,000, a strange woman (Tilda Swinton, working a priceless stork-walk) is pursuing him to collect money he stole back in London — long story — and he’s persona non grata in almost every joint in town. The man has promised to fix everything, and “a Lord always keeps his word.” The next morning, she’s gone. And yet, after a series of further downward spirals that will dig this scalawag even deeper into a hole and some supernatural mumbo-jumbo, his luck curiously starts to change….

A German director with a flair for melodrama and maximalism, Berger knows how to make pulp feel prestigious (Conclave) and prestige pictures feel like pulp (that inexplicably lauded production of All Quiet on the Western Front). He splits the middle here, playing up the location’s luxury gaudiness and dizzying overstimulation with equally extravagant visual flourishes — if there’s an opportunity for an askew angle, he and cinematographer James Friend will most assuredly go Dutch — while clearly setting up a stage for Farrell to strut, fret and rage bull-like. It feels like the director and his star are competing for the same Most Baroque Player brass ring, even when they’re working in tandem; every time Berger frames Farrell in nervous-system-goosing close-ups, you’re not sure whether you’re supposed to be more impressed with the filmmaker’s claustrophobic framing or the actor’s sopping-brow breakdowns. You’re tempted to call it a draw.
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There’s clearly a victor, however. Farrell has been experiencing a fertile third wave since The Banshees of Inershin and The Penguin reminded us what he’s capable of in terms of left-field choices, subtle shifts of mood and the alchemy of turning scenery-noshing into gold. (Even his misses, like the Apple TV series Sugar and the recent A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, have him doing some intriguing stuff on the periphery.) Given the chance to play a self-invented gadfly and gweilo — a term reserved for non-Asian “hungry ghosts” that the locals bestow upon him — Farrell goes all in. He has the red-rimmed eyes of a man into the abyss headfirst. Later, when Doyle comes into some mysterious bags of cash, and heads toward the mainland with a bottle of booze, a boat, and one last chance to go out in a blaze of self-immolation, Farrell manages to mix dread and adrenaline into every silent expression.

It’s in this last act that Ballad of a Small Player truly puts all of it chips on its lead, and while that faith doesn’t make up for a lot of the ridiculous twists and overplayed hands leading up to a climactic streak, it’s still a smart bet. Pay attention to what Farrell is doing, and the movie modestly pays off. The key to it all, however, is handed to a different player: Hong Kong cinema legend Anthony Wong, dropping by for a drive-by cameo. He relates an anecdote to Doyle about a gambler who dies and goes to heaven. Once there, the man is given the penthouse suite, five-star meals, and nothing but aces at every table he frequents. I wonder what’s happening at “the other place,” he casually asks a fellow patron. You can guess the reply. The only thing better than winning big is losing even bigger. It’s a lesson this film takes to heart.