'Ballad of a Small Player': Colin Farrell can't save gambling stinker

Edward Berger’s "Ballad of a Small Player", starring Colin Farrell as a down-on-his-luck gambler in Macau, arrives with high expectations following the director’s Oscar-winning "All Quiet on the Western Front" and critically acclaimed "Conclave". Los Angeles (tca/dpa) – "Ballad of a Small Player" is director Edward Berger's third movie in four years. The first two, "All Quiet on the Western Front" and "Conclave" earned 17 Oscar nominations between them, including best picture nods for both. You'd think that would make "Ballad of a Small Player" something of an event or, at the very least, eagerly anticipated by people who enjoy movies with a straightforward directorial style, keen attention to production and costume design and the kind of booming score that will spike your tinnitus for days after you leave the theater. And those Berger hallmarks are certainly on display in the new one, a drama about a dandy named Lord Doyle, a down-and-out con man and gambling addict on the brink of a breakdown in the kitschy gaming hub of Macau. What's missing, crucially, is a reason for the audience to care about this narcissist, even though Colin Farrell employs every trick in his acting arsenal to win you over. And if Farrell, an actor I'd follow just about anywhere (except perhapsancient Macedonia ), can't make you feel for this guy, you know "Ballad" has problems that are extensive as the good lord's unpaid hotel bill. We first see Doyle, whose title, as you'd probably guess, is self-bequeathed, through a reflection off his stainless steel room service tray. (Mirror images are employed often in the film.) Doyle's opulent Macau hotel suite is in disarray and he isn't in much better shape. But there is work to be done, so he puts on his green velvet suit, his lucky Savile Row gloves and tries to remember where he stashed his one last roll of bills. In a voice-over, Doyle tells us he's a "high roller on a slippery slope." "Here, I barely exist," he continues, calling himself agweilo , a Cantonese term for a foreign ghost cloaked in invisibility. "Here, I can be whoever I want to be." Doyle is clearly delusional. Cloaked in invisibility? This peacock stands out even in Macau, a city that embraces garishness almost as much as it does light pollution. Berger plays the opening section of the film as farce, but then switches the tone, seeming to realize that he doesn't have the facility or interest in heightened comedy. He's more comfortable playing it big and trying to create an operatic drama about a desperate man, consumed by greed and a gnawing hunger that has rotted his soul, looking for one last score. It's a movie we've seen countless times, though not in Macau, and Berger banks on the location to create shiny, stylized images that might distract you from the familiar emptiness of the story. For a moment, it seems Doyle's luck might change when he meets Dao Ming (Fala Chen), a casino employee whose job is to extend lines of credit to addicts like Doyle, enabling them to fall even more deeply into debt. But her heart isn't in her work and for reasons we never buy, she takes pity on Doyle, recognizing in him a "lost soul." "It's never too late to change," she tells him. (Has she seen his hotel room?) "Ballad," written by Rowan Joffé, adapting Lawrence Osborne's vivid 2014 novel, depicts Dao Ming as a fellow ghost, though in her case, the distinction might be quite literal. The movie keeps you guessing on that count, as did the book. There's an additional woman in Doyle's life, Cynthia Blithe (Tilda Swinton ), a guest staying at his hotel who he spies taking his picture for reasons Doyle can only assume aren't good. She's another character with a slippery identity and Swinton, always entertaining, has some fun with her, embracing the movie's over-the-top aesthetic by donning kooky pink eyeglasses and sporting an electroshock hairstyle. With "All Quiet on the Western Front" and "Conclave," Berger showed himself to be a canny crowd-pleaser, capable of jumping genres and drawing out fine work from his leads. Here, he seems as lost in the bright lights as Doyle, piling on disorienting camera angles and an overcooked sound design to create an unfocused fever dream about individual excess that exhausts the humanity from its story. It's an overload of overkill, yet as tedious and empty as the last day of a 72-hour trip to Vegas when the novelty has worn off and you just want to go home and sleep. The following information is not intended for publication tca dpa coh

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