Runner Runner, the latest poker story from writers Brian Koppelman and David Levien, came out late last week. It was down to the felt by the end of opening weekend, drawing terrible reviews all around with a score of 36 (out of 100) on review-aggregating site Metacritic. Though our own Lee Davy didn’t give it a numerical score he was thoroughly unimpressed with its script.
It’s unsurprising that Runner Runner isn’t connecting with audiences because the standard narrative film form makes it difficult to tell a really good poker story. When you start trying to list great movies about poker, you’re inevitably going to come up with a short list.
THREE GOOD ONES AND NOT MUCH ELSE
The top spot for a lot of people will go to Rounders, the 1998 outing from writers Koppelman and Levien that introduced us Teddy KGB, Worm, and soon-to-be law school dropout Mike McDermott. The movie has its fair share of flaws but its lively, evocative, and convincing vision of New York’s underground card rooms makes it easy to forget them. It also has a simple plot in which a young hotshot earn what he sees as his rightful spot (in Vegas, playing with the game’s best at the Mirage) from the older Russian mobster who stands in his way.
The other movie most people will list is The Cincinnati Kid, the 1965 Steve McQueen-starring adaptation of Richard Jessup’s 1964 novel. Like Rounders decades later, The Cincinnati Kid’s setting – in this case a marathon underground poker match in Depression-era New Orleans, a departure from Jessup’s original setting in 1950s St. Louis – does a lot of the lifting by creating a rich and believable atmosphere for an otherwise simple plot of a younger man trying to take what he wants from the older man who isn’t ready to relinquish it.
As spare as those plots are, they’re practically pure plot next to Robert Altman’s 1972 film California Split. Richer in atmosphere than either of the commonly cited films above, it follows a pair of poker players (Elliott Gould and George Segal) on a freewheeling impromptu trip in and around the poker scene of California and northern Nevada. The lack of any pressing plot constraints to be resolved by the end of the film gives these two characters room to come to life. It also makes California Split probably the most interesting film about poker that’s ever been made.
After those three films there’s not much to speak of, other than a pretty brilliant scene in Ocean’s Eleven where Brad Pitt’s character teaches the game to a group of spoiled Hollywood actors who want to look cool. A spate of poker-themed flicks that came out during the poker boom of the 2000s were as forgettable as their titles. In an attempt to cash in on the trend, films like Lucky You and Deal focused not only on poker players as central characters but also made poker central to the plot. By focusing on the pro poker world viewers were familiar with from televised tournaments, they had to spend time on poker-celebrity cameos and glamorous shots of casinos to create verisimilitude. Beyond that they had to resolve a whole lot of poker-playing to grind their creaking plots forward. That left little time to get to know the characters, which sank them as stories.
TV GETS POKER RIGHT
Even though they’re told through a visual medium, modern serialized television dramas are much more akin to novels than films in that they give us time to get to know characters and really understand their motivations. It’s unsurprising, then, that where films have generally failed to realize how to make poker an effective story point, some TV shows have used well-placed poker scenes in non-poker plots to develop character.
A simple poker scene or plot line can give greater depth and realism to a TV series’ characters. But more importantly, it can do so without having the entire series hinge upon it. That’s a luxury that films, which typically give us just a handful of scenes to get to know a character before experience a full story arc with him, can’t afford.
BREAKING BAD
One of my favorite examples comes in Season 1, Episode 6 of Vince Gilligan’s recently departed masterpiece, Breaking Bad. Chemistry teacher Walter White (Bryan Cranston), who has begun cooking methamphetamine using equipment from his high school’s lab, plays a game of hold’em with his family. In on the game is his boisterous brother-in-law, DEA agent Hank Schrader (Dean Norris), who earlier in the day busted an innocent janitor named Hugo for the theft of the lab equipment.
Hank brags about the bust as Walt calls a bet by his sister-in-law Marie (Betsy Brandt) on the turn of a hand with the ace of clubs and three small hearts on the board. Mild-mannered Walt says he doesn’t think the janitor was a thief, and Hank replies with a condescending chuckle: “Nothing personal, Walt, but you wouldn’t know a criminal if he was close enough to check you for a hernia!” He tells the family that even though Hugo didn’t raid the lab, he was going to jail for being “a major-league pothead.” Then Hank, last to act on the hand, looks at Walt and asks: “Are you hiding something?” He finally calls and deals the ace of hearts on the river.
The rest of the family folds out, leaving just Walt and Hank in the hand. Walt is more interested in hearing about what will happen to Hugo than in the hand. Eventually Hank asks, puffing up his chest cartoonishly: “Are you going to man up, or are you going to puss out?” Walt studies him for a moment before moving all-in.
Hank begins to laugh: “You bad, bad, bad, horrible liar! Whatcha smokin’ there, huh? Got a heart? You’ve got the flush, don’t you? Nope, I’m not falling for it, buddy.” Hank triumphantly folds his hand. Then Marie fishes into the deck to see what Hank folded: the ace of diamonds and king of clubs, for three of a kind. She’s shocked that he would fold trips, and even more so when she reveals that Walt moved all-in with seven-deuce of spades: a stone-cold bluff.
BOARDWALK EMPIRE
Another series that got poker right is HBO’s Prohibition-era drama, Boardwalk Empire. By Season 4, Episode 4, the show’s fictional main character, former Atlantic City treasurer Nucky Thompson (Steve Buscemi), has endured four years of violent ups and downs in the black-market alcohol business through constantly shifting alliances with other crime bosses. Among them is Arnold Rothstein (Michael Stuhlbarg), a real-life character notorious for his involvement in bootlegging, illegal narcotics, and gambling. Rothstein, obsessed with winning every contest he takes part in, has alternately sided with Nucky and fought him depending on his own interests at the time.
Now it’s 1924 and the two are at peace after a recent truce brokered when Nucky told Rothstein and several other rivals that he was satisfied with the territory he controlled in New Jersey and wanted no more quarrel with them. Nucky, who has recently learned of Florida’s potential as a distribution point for illegal booze from the Caribbean, wants Rothstein to join him in purchasing land in Tampa. He invites Rothstein to Atlantic City to talk business; Rothstein, though skeptical due to Nucky’s profession of satisfaction with his Jersey business, agrees. That night he insists that the two play poker together, saying, “I find you don’t really know a man until you play cards with him.” “Don’t we know each other, Arnold?” says Nucky. “One would have thought so,” says Rothstein, who goes downstairs and buys in for $100,000.
Up to this point in the series, Rothstein’s ruthlessness and acumen have always placed him on the winning side of his battles. Historically this is accurate; he was rumored to have fixed the 1919 World Series and numerous horse races, and he made a name for himself as a paid mediator between other gangsters. But just four years later Rothstein would be killed in a casino as punishment for his refusal to pay a large gambling debt he acquired during a bad streak in a three-day poker game, which he claimed was fixed.
Summoned to the table later in the night, Nucky bets $5,000 to knock him out of a pot. “Now you’ve got my attention,” Rothstein says. Hours later, Nucky is shown having already cleaned Rothstein out with one round of betting left. With a grim smile plastered to his face, Rothstein asks to borrow money from the house to make his bet – $200,000. “There are other games, Arnold,” says Nucky. “No,” Rothstein says, “there’s only the game you’re in now.”
Nucky begrudgingly approves the loan, the chips for which have barely been placed on the table when Rothstein moves all-in. Nucky looks down at his card, sighs, and calls with a queen-high flush. A sheepish Rothstein looks down and grins just for a moment before his face falls. “I figured you for a straight,” he says. “You figured me wrong again,” Nucky says. “Nice getting to know you, Arnold.”
Rothstein remains at the table into the early morning, playing on credit; stinging from his losses to a snarky anti-Semite, he calls for a fresh deck. Then he asks for another, snapping at the dealer and saying he doesn’t like “the feel of it.” He only stands up to leave after his young associate Meyer Lansky (Anatol Yusef) whispers to him, “Wouldn’t it be best if people don’t see you like this?” Then Lansky goes to Nucky to ask that he extend no more credit to Rothstein because he’s on a “bad streak.” “He’s a great man, but he doesn’t like to lose,” says Lansky. “Nobody likes to, but we all have to learn how,” says Nucky, who then calls of the deal because he can’t trust Rothstein. Lansky, who has always been a minor player in the series up to this point, then swoops in as a free agent to take over the Florida partnership for himself.
A BETTER FIT, NATURALLY
The Breaking Bad poker scene is by no means a spoiler-alert-worthy show-changer, but it does shows us two critical pieces of information that foreshadow what will happen in the last four seasons of the show. First, the only cop likely to bring Walt down in the future will misread him if Walt makes the right play. Second, and most importantly, Walt has it in him both to recognize the openings for those plays and to pull the trigger on making them. He’ll use that knowledge repeatedly as he rises to become a highly unlikely drug kingpin.
In the case of Boardwalk Empire, poker broadens the world of the series, which has freely mixed historical characters with fictional, by deepening its main fictional character’s ties to real-life gangsters known for their ties to gambling. These scenes between Rothstein and the fictional Nucky foreshadow the former’s eventual demise due to his obstinate nature. Considering Rothstein is regarded as a particularly sharp man, this also serves to highlight Nucky’s clearheadedness as he moves into a new venture that could secure his future after four years of tumult. And it shows that Lansky is not just a valuable associate to Rothstein but a shrewd operator is his own right. It’s the kind of depth a feature film almost never achieves – not for lack of trying, but because of structural constraints.
We won’t get another chance to see if Hollywood can get poker right before 2014, when Koppelman and Levien are supposedly due to see their script for Rounders 2 translated to the big screen. It’s still unsure whether that will even happen, but even it comes to fruition I’m not going to hold my breath for a great poker movie – and not just because of Runner Runner. I’d rather catch the occasional poker scene on my favorite TV shows, where it’s more likely to tell me something new about characters who already keep me coming back each week.
