Dahl: Rounders (1998)

Rounders features Edward Norton and Matt Damon as a pair of high-stakes poker players, but it’s hard to say whether it’s a crime film or not. For the most part, it’s about their efforts to work their way into old New York money, or at least scam as many Ivy League graduates as possible, by way of the underground gambling scene. As a result, the whole film is poised at a queasy cusp where the warm glow of trust fund clubrooms washes out into the cool fluorescence of the street, creating a grungy, tungsten ambience that’s quite undecided about who are the criminals and who are the good guys. Shot through with a subterranean, startup palette, it takes its cues from the cyber underground that was starting to become prevalent in films around this time, the perpetual graveyard shift that seemed to momentarily bring noir cityscapes to life again. In fact, Damon’s voiceover, which makes up at least half the script, could quite easily play as a self-help audio book, a business guide for anyone wanting to ride the bubble that seems to be expanding with each new poker game, each new circle of gullible faces. From his perspective, poker is hardly about strategy at all, let alone chance, and more about being able to network, read people, read the room, which also means scrutinising faces for the most minor, subliminal tics and tells, invisible or ineffable to all but the most accomplished players. More than that, it’s about a heightened apprehension of style, a taste for cool that inevitably favours the younger generation, which also means that it’s not a film that subsists on tension so much as simply inhabiting Damon and Norton’s heightened palette and perception, their exquisite sense of poise. And that’s perfect for Norton’s face, which has enough twitch and glitch to bury any tell deep inside itself. He’s an actor who can perform ambiguity like a pro, which perhaps makes Rounders the film in which he comes closest to playing himself, or playing his own star image. Filmed poker can sometimes make you reach for the remote, but Rounders reminds you that it's really one of the most cinephilic of sports, a sport lived, breathed and apprehended in close-up, especially when it’s shot as atmospherically and suspensefully as it is here.