Written by: Rowan Joffé
Starring: Colin Farrell, Fala Chen, Deanie Ip, Alex Jennings, Tilda Swinton
Rating: [2.5/5]
Stories focusing on degenerate gamblers all play the same tune. We see the stories of individuals who certainly have some skill in the games they engage in but may hit a bad streak that places them in a hole they cannot get out of. You then cannot forget the seedy underground that inevitably gets involved, and you have yourself a gambling movie. Ballad of a Small Player uses every trope within its genre and hopes to dress it up with flashy cinematography, but ultimately it fails in distracting us from the emptiness at its core.
Living out his gambling dreams in Macau, Brendan (Colin Farrell) goes by Lord Doyle. He has accumulated quite the level of gambling debt and just barely skates by being hounded by creditors looking for their return. When an investigator from back home finally catches him and confronts him about how he initially got his funds to make it out of Macacu, Brendan must find a way to fund his restitution before it’s too late.
As mentioned before, stories centered on gamblers focus on these individuals who cannot help but get their fix in trying to continually win. This works like a drug to them, and we see no difference with Brendan and how he manages to behave himself in Macau. Not only does he gamble, but the man has some character deficiencies in establishing himself as a man of honor. He lives a life of opulence and tries his very best to not pay for it all for as long as he can. We see this behavior all before Cynthia Blithe (Tild Swinton) enters the story to let the audience know how Brenden is even more of a scumbag than we originally believed from the beginning. We thus need to follow this man and try to muster together the funds to get him out of these terrible circumstances he created for himself.
On paper, this character should garner no sympathy, but when you cast Colin Farrell in the role, you can make even the most heinous character likeable. Farrell makes this character so watchable in the way this frantic behavior gets him through this genuinely difficult position. The sweatier and more desperate the man gets, the more Farrell’s performance continues to stand out in delivering something worth watching, even if the script itself does not deliver in the same way.
Accompanying Farrell, we have the wondrous visual display provided by cinematographer James Friend and director Edward Berger. Macau has never looked more vibrant, and the rich use of color throughout this film at times convinced me that it could cover up for the lack of quality in the narrative. Everything visually has this richness to it that makes sense when seeing how an area lined with casinos will look and the feeling this palette seeks to evoke. This kaleidoscope of color sees director Edward Berger operating on a completely different plane as a vast visual presentation, at least compared to his two most recent works. He assaults the audience with these colors and a sweaty Colin Farrell anxiously trying to figure out how he can possibly get himself out of this situation.
However, with all of that said, this film still manages to fail in creating a wholly effective narrative for us to truly attach ourselves to. Yes, it maintained clarity in its presentation, but nothing about it really drove any meaningful interest. Nothing about this story presented something that had not been shown in a different story but much better. It stands to reason why many describe this film as something with style over substance, and I find it hard to disagree with that sentiment.
Coming off of a fantastic film in Conclave, Edward Berger more than had my attention for any future projects he would take on, but Ballad of a Small Player was not it. A fledgling film that never could find its footing in hoping to tell a compelling story but rather relied on some lovely visuals and a strong lead performance to carry it over the finish line. Unfortunately, while it leaned on its best elements, the project as a whole did not measure up as and ultimately landed as a disappointment.
Films with Josh 
