Telluride ’25: Ballad of a Small Player

½*/****
starring Colin Farrell, Fala Chen, Deanie Ip, Tilda Swinton
screenplay by Rowan Joffe, based on The Ballad of a Small Player by Lawrence Osborne
directed by Edward Berger

by Walter Chaw Edward Berger follows up Conclave, his empty, showy relevance-grab of an Executive Suite remake, with Ballad of a Small Player, a similarly grandiose gambling flick that aims to reboot Peter Bogdanovich’s masterpiece Saint Jack but succeeds mainly in resurrecting the Ghosts of Orientalism Past. Gambler, conman, and small player of the title Lord Doyle (Colin Farrell) staggers through the slick gunmetal and neon streets of Macau looking for games of Baccarat like James Bond Man with a Golden Gun-ning for trouble. He meets his Waterloo in a supernaturally lucky old crone who never loses a hand because she’s riding shotgun to a hustler from the spirit world. It’s not as interesting as it sounds. After hitting a gambler’s rock-bottom, Doyle falls in with conscience-burdened casino manager Dao Ming (Fala Chen), who, in true Celestial lotus-blossom fashion, offers herself as a sacrificial moral lamb for a wayward gwielo trying to walk the straight and narrow.

It’s a redemption narrative, then, wherein an irredeemable, solipsistic hedonist is given a second chance at a crowd-pleasing happy ending. To that ignoble end, Berger and his cinematographer, James Friend, throw every trick in the DP book of obnoxious legerdemain at the screen while Volker Bertelmann’s bombastic score shakes plaster from the walls and stirs a groggy and pissed-off Wagner from his rest. The style is aggressive to the point of hostile, every whip pan and explosive orchestral sting a rabbit-punch to the senses. This isn’t making a mountain out of a molehill–it’s making an entire range of mountains, nay, volcanoes. Vesuviuses, all erupting at the same time, for a solid 101 minutes. You would think that means this garbage is a straight-line, by-the-numbers exercise, but you’d be underestimating the extent to which Berger appears to be bullying stunned voters into awards-season recognition. In a failed effort at being clever, there’s a wink-wink reference to that episode of “The Twilight Zone” where a gambler finds that his Hell is a casino that never lets him lose, albeit referenced as an Ancient Chinese Proverb rather than a Rod Serling morality play. I’m only surprised they didn’t introduce it with a gong and a “Confucius say…”

Ballad of a Small Player is a rollercoaster that eschews the lead-up for a deadening, mind-numbing plummet. Let me off. Tilda Swinton plays another variety of hag-haired, eccentric British bird, a debtor seeking repayment from Lord Doyle in flesh, if not cash. Again, please, don’t let me make this sound interesting. It’s her Snowpiercer turn all over again, minus the freshness. Her Cynthia isn’t an assassin–she’s a social-media warrior. How’s that for pathetic stakes? Ballad of a Small Player is loud but toothless. One evening, Lord Doyle witnesses a gambler’s suicide, gets his brow split by a grieving widow, and chases Dao Ming to a Macau tenement, where he delivers pages of Dr. Phil character motivation at her, including the old saw “You’re just like me.” Heads don’t roll in Ballad of a Small Player, but eyes sure do. Desperate now to get exciting again, the picture immediately offs romantic lead Dao Ming through a series of events so poorly conceived and executed that the episode draws attention to itself as either a contrivance conjured in post-production or the inciting inspiration of a script that never gave it a second thought. Considering how the entire film’s emotional centre relies on Doyle and Dao Ming’s chemistry, killing her after five minutes of screentime is certainly a choice.

Here’s my real beef: Beyond all the conventional ways it sucks, Ballad of a Small Player is a bigot. It traffics in exhausted racist tropes that cast Macau as a nexus of mysticism and superstition. The great Anthony Wong, an elder statesman of Hong Kong cinema, is wheeled out for a grand minute of showing what this film could have been. As a casino boss of bosses, he’s so quietly authoritative, so effortlessly menacing, that I wonder if it ever crossed anyone’s mind to make him the centre of this picture. I love Colin Farrell. He consistently elevates everything he’s in and does yeoman’s work here, contorting his face and body to mimic the exaggerated strutting and fretting a contrived martinet of a flick demands–but what if Ballad of a Small Player featured Wong instead? Wong with his gravity. Wong with his inimitable, intimidating aura. What would possess anyone to tell the story of a white guy’s troubles in a hostile and alien Oriental landscape instead of attempting an Asian-centered Casino once Wong stepped on set?

As is, the film is Black Rain all over again: an expensive-looking exploitation flick in which Asian women are stereotypes as obviously offensive as they are potentially hazardous for the human beings they caricature. A mid-credits sequence with Farrell and Swinton doing a manic tango lit by strobe lights and awash in ecstatic slopsweat suggests the contemptuous final preen in a movie composed of them. Ballad of a Small Player is a touchdown celebration of colonial despoilers–uninvited guests taking a victory shit in someone’s living room. These rich white folks are tourists invading forbidden pleasuredome Macau to loot and pillage and then perform a dance choreographed as a taunt. Look at how the colonizer acts the fool; just another story of a guy with every advantage, throwing it all away in an Asian Mos Eisley as a cautionary tale about the dangers of talking to the sinister Celestials on the road to grandmother’s house. It seems like Berger has learned his empathy for Asians exclusively from the Siamese Cat duet in Lady and the Tramp. Ballad of a Small Player is as misbegotten and ungainly as its title. What a fucking mess.