Monday Movie Review: The Cooler

The Cooler (2003) 9/10
Bernie Lootz (William H. Macy) is a "cooler;" a guy who "cools off" a table in a casino when the gamblers are winning too much. According to casino manager Shelly (Alec Baldwin), Bernie is the biggest loser who ever was; "Kryptonite on a stick." But when Bernie meets Natalie (Maria Bello) his luck starts to change, and Shelly isn't too pleased.

I fell in love with The Cooler fairly early on, and when it started to fumble in the final reel, I stuck with it. This movie is so wonderful, so lyrical, that I kept forgiving odd moments, small cliches, and failures of logic.

The most extraordinary part of the film is certainly Macy's performance. As Bernie, Macy makes being a loser a kind of poetry; Bernie is tender, sad, careful, angry, cynical, and hopeful, all in a delicate and graceful arc. Yeah, sure, Baldwin is the one with the big nomination, but for my money, this movie is all Macy's.

When Bernie meets Natalie, at first she ignores him, and that's fine with him. He's a loser, what else can he expect? When she shows interest in him, he's so surprised he tells her he can't afford to pay for her; he assumes that's the only reason anyone would want him. He's well into making love to her before he's sure that she really does want to be there.

The Cooler has a theory about luck and having an open heart; that being a loser is about how you feel and who you choose to be, and it's all so lovely that you hesitate to notice that it's also stupid. Because the movie shows you things that are stupid; if our basic goodness and joyfulness created good luck, well then, life would be much more predictable than it is. Yet the movie haunted me, its insane implausibility seemed incongruous, but I wanted to embrace it anyway, and then I realized...

The Cooler is a fairy tale.

(More below the fold)
You don't realize this at first because it is gritty, with vividly realistic violence and sex. Baldwin is his usual character, flamboyantly vulgar, putting new twists on old foulness. The casino underworld and its tensions and characters are almost lavishly realistic. There are no wings nor pointy ears in sight. And yet this is a fairy tale, a tale of good luck triumphing over bad luck, a tale of goodness trying to find its way out of a sea of darkness and corruption.

The storyline with a long-lost son is still clunky, and arrives in a poorly timed and poorly staged manner. Okay. But when viewed as a fable, The Cooler glows with its own kind of magical light, and is an exquisite film experience.

(Magical mysterious cross-post)