Ballad of a Small Player Review: Edward Berger’s Visually Stunning Gambling Thriller is Far From a Winner
Ballad of a Small Player, which marks Edward Berger’s highly anticipated follow-up to Conclave, looks like a sure bet to land a spot in my year-end top ten list. But just like this month’s A House of Dynamite, which is also streaming on Netflix, Ballad of a Small Player bets big and loses half of it, leaving only a few redeeming factors that at least salvage this gambling thriller from ending up as a total wreck.
Well, speaking of wreck, Colin Farrell’s self-styled Lord Doyle sure looks like one, and I mean it in a good way. He gives it his all playing a desperate bloke who’s been overstaying his welcome in one of the casino hotels in Macau. He owes the hotel a large sum of overdue pay, and the management gives him three days to clear his bill. Doyle may have been a mess, but he sure knows how to look posh with all the fancy suits and wears a stylish pair of so-called lucky yellow leather gloves whenever he decides to gamble.
The movie actually gets off to a promising start, beginning with Berger demonstrating a good eye for lush and colourful visuals, given the movie’s Macau setting as the gambling capital of the world. The neon-drenched landscape, coupled with James Friend’s slick cinematography and Berger’s dynamic camerawork, is a sight to behold. The director doesn’t waste time establishing Farrell’s character right from the get-go, moving from one scene to another that keeps the movie busy.
Earlier in the movie, a minor character simply called Grandma (Deanie Ip) is having a field day cursing Doyle in Cantonese profanities — something that you don’t often hear from this veteran Hong Kong actress. She may have been a small player — no pun intended — in this movie, but she manages to make the best use of her limited screentime. From there, Doyle meets a beautiful loan shark, Dao Ming (Fala Chen), who has been keeping an eye on him. She somewhat took pity on him, and for a while there, their brief moment of seeing these two seemingly lost souls spending time together gives the movie a subtly melancholic touch.
But too bad Chen’s Dao Ming comes and goes and reappears when the story calls for it, before something is revealed about the fate of her character. Let’s just say it’s one of those movies that spins a story in a jarring manner, like those shifting tones lacking the narrative discipline. Even if it meant to be a wild ride exploring Doyle’s whirlwind life on the edge and the people that he’s heavily involved with (Dao Ming), the movie frequently loses its emotional and dramatic weight as the story moves along.
I also can’t help noticing the movie tends to meander around with the rinse-and-repeat nature of watching Doyle gamble, lose, and eat impulsively, to the point I begin to lose interest. Not to mention the pace grows erratic, save for the brief but memorable stretch of the confrontation between Doyle and Tilda Swinton’s Cynthia Blithe, where the latter shows up as a private investigator who’s been hired to locate his whereabouts and retrieve the money he stole.
It’s a pity that for all the themes of gambling addiction, greed, identity, loneliness and redemption incorporated in Ballad of a Small Player are simply cobbled together without giving them a thorough execution. The movie’s saving grace, as mentioned earlier, is Farrell’s committed performance backed by Fala Chen, Deanie Ip and Tilda Swinton. But all these, including the mesmerising technical showcase, aren’t enough to offset most of the shortcomings.
Ballad of a Small Player is currently streaming on Netflix.
