I think I’ve just seen the best film of 2004 so far. And I don’t think many to come will match Wayne Kramer’s funny, melancholy and wise Las Vegas comedy-drama The Cooler.
Here, William H Macy — who has made a career out of playing beautiful losers — plays Bernie Lootz, a man whose luck is so bad it’s contagious. He works for Shelly (Alec Baldwin), who runs the Shangri-La, last of the old Rat Pack-style gambling houses in Vegas, and he’s a ”cooler”.
That is to say, his function is to stand beside any player on a big winning streak and transmit bad-luck vibes in his direction until the guy starts losing and the house gets its money back. And it seems to work: Bernie shows up and the cards turn to jokers, and the dice come up snake-eyes every time.
But Bernie’s days in the role are numbered. He and Shelly go way back. They used to pick pockets together on Coney Island, but along the line things fell apart. Cooling off winners is Bernie’s way of making good a debt.
He has seven days to go until he is free and clear, but suddenly he meets cocktail waitress Natalie (Maria Bello), falls in love with her and discovers she is Lady Luck.
Meaning the slots start to vomit cash and the cards all come up aces. This is not good news for Shelly, who is already dealing with a smooth new owner (Ron Livingston), who threatens to suck the soul out of the Shangri-La and turn it into yet another walk-in Disneyland hellhole. And he’ll do anything not to lose his best loser.
Somehow Vegas, that handful of glittering shaman’s jewels strewn across the desert night, always brings out the stylist in a good director, and The Cooler has the jazzy, timeless, ring-a-ding-ding ritziness that so enlivened Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven, PT Anderson’s Hard Eight and Martin Scorsese’s Casino.
It also, crucially, has wonderful actors doing some of the best work of their careers. Macy, with his glum, crumpled, hand-me-down Walter Matthau face, is often heartbreaking — at least until his luck turns and his smile makes an appearance. Bello, who until now has laboured away unrecognised, can count on a heavy work schedule after this gritty and poignant performance.
The greatest pleasure, though, is Baldwin, a fine actor who is obviously much more comfortable as a character player than he was as a big star in the 1980s.
His Shelly is a richly complicated man, devoted to Bernie but more so to the bottom line, utterly ruthless in business but sweetly fond of his beautiful gambling house and old-Vegas characters like Paul Sorvino’s ageing junkie lounge singer.
All in all, The Cooler is a leading contender for 2004’s best. — Â