In the movies, at least, Macau seems as far away from a real city as you can get, a futuristic dreamworld of neon reflected on water, of shiny Emerald City-style architecture, an Eden of gambling where you could just as easily lose your soul as your shirt. In Edward Berger’s floridly stylized drama Ballad of a Small Player, Colin Farrell plays a compulsive gambler who’s on his way to losing both. He goes by the name Lord Doyle, though he’s hardly a lord, and he’s not even a Doyle. He favors velvet jackets worn with open-collared shirts, a jaunty silk scarf at the neck, a disguise that allows him to prowl the casinos of Macau like self-appointed royalty. But not only has he done some pretty bad stuff in the process of building that façade; he’s on a terrible losing streak, and the casinos have stopped bankrolling him. “I’m a high roller on a slippery slope,” he says in a jittery voiceover in the movie’s opening minutes. You’re poised to spend the rest of the movie watching him tumble down that resolutely unglamorous hill.
But something else happens: while he’s sweating out a horrific loss at the baccarat table—his opponent is formidable senior citizen known as Grandma, played by Deanie Ip—a casino employee of incomparable elegance steps forward to help. Dao Ming (Fala Chen, a grounded, understated presence) offers Doyle an advance, with steep interest; as he weighs the offer, he orders a bottle of Cristal and splits before paying the tab. She gazes after him sympathetically: “He’s a lost soul,” she tells Grandma dreamily, though Doyle wants none of her pity.
He does, however, need her help, and she’ll appear again in his hour of need. (It turns out that she, too, has sins to atone for, and debts to pay.) Meanwhile, a persnickety bank investigator, played by Tilda Swinton in a frizzle of red hair and clompy shoes, approaches Doyle with a serious charge. He’s not just a lovable bumbler with a gambling addiction; he has committed crimes in which innocent people were hurt. She trails him doggedly, nagging him for a massive sum he can’t possibly scrape up—though even she, so rigidly devoted to her job that she takes no pleasure in life, could also use a little redemption.
Tilda Swinton Courtesy of Netflix
Through it all, Farrell’s Doyle stammers and sputters, his woebegone eyebrows carrying the full weight of his worries. Farrell is such a sympathetic actor that he nearly succeeds in making you care about Doyle and his problems. But Ballad of a Small Player—adapted by Rowan Joffe from Lawrence Osborne’s novel—doesn’t give you much to hang onto besides style, and even those pleasures are slender. The movie has the color palette of a garish tricolored ice pop, a jumble of psychedelic turquoise blue and incandescent fuchsia. It’s all vaguely cartoony, perhaps as a way of signaling that we’re not supposed to take it all that seriously—but you also never feel that anything is really at stake. Berger, whose pope-election nail biter Conclave was one of the most delightful surprises of last year, does pull off some moody grandeur here. In its best moments—particularly a sequence in which Doyle and Dao Ming tenderly exchange confidences while parked on a modest bench with the lights of Macau far in the distance—it almost achieves a dreamy Wong Kar Wai vibe. But no actor, not even the forthright and sensitive Farrell, can survive the number of tight, sweaty closeups that cinematographer James Friend subjects him to. Ballad of a Small Player is only modestly entertaining, its allure as false as the neon promise of the high-rolling city it’s set in.
