Dir.
Wayne Kramer, 2003, USA, 101 mins
Cast:
William H Macy, Alec Baldwin, Maria Bello, Ron Livingston, Paul Sorvino
The Cooler opens as the camera swoops over the night-time lights of Las Vegas like a ball bearing gliding through a giant pinball machine. A moaning saxophone bleats the melancholy soundtrack over the buzz of neon signs and into the faded Shangri-La casino, where barely-clad waitresses holding silver drinks trays criss-cross each other between galleys of slot machines. The Shangri-La is exposed as a fat, overly made-up lounge singer surviving on a past glory that is now out of place in Donald Trump's theme park Las Vegas.
Master of all he purveys at the Shangri-La is Shelley Kaplow (Baldwin). As out-dated as his club, Shelley uses the unconventional tactic of employing a cooler. Bernie Lootz (Macy) is so unlucky that he just needs to stand at a winning table to end a player's lucky streak. Shelley is on to a good thing until new management pay him a visit and suggest he employs alternative methods to deter winners, such as playing a CD that repeats the subliminal mantra "lose", or hire more "muff confetti" and none with "less than a C cup". Shelley dismisses new guy Larry Sokolov's ( Livingston ) "Epcot Centre bullshit" and shows him how things are done the Shelley way - that is with extreme violence and a baseball bat.
Bernie is working off a gambling debt to Shelley by operating as the cooler on Shelley's floor, and we enter the Shangri-La during the last seven days of Bernie's penance. Once Shelley realises he really is going to lose his cooler he hires down-on-her-luck drifter Natalie Belisario (Bello) to fall in love with Bernie and keep him at the casino. The action then flits between Bernie's surprisingly sexy relationship with Natalie, their relationship with the out of control Shelley, and Shelley's efforts to keep the Shangri-La as an old-style gambling joint. Bernie is further thrown into flux when his estranged son and pregnant girlfriend show-up and run the gauntlet of Shelley's wrath by cheating on the dice tables.
The Cooler is a collaboration between director Wayne Kramer and first time screenwriter Frank Hannah that delivers a hypnotising mixture of reality, luck and the surreal side of Las Vegas. In this 24-hour artificial electric playground for the gambler, where time is rendered meaningless by a lack of clocks, why shouldn't something as simple as luck run everybody's life? This is the Sliding Doors philosophy of if you'd got up five minutes later, or sat on another bar stool, your life could have worked out very differently. For someone like Bernie who considers himself so utterly unlucky, he finds out that things can change for the better once a little piece of good luck (like Natalie) comes his way.
Whilst South African born Kramer and Scottish Hannah have concocted a wonderfully sleazy, 1950s American lounge bar backdrop for their story, the film belongs to the characters and their relationships. Macy gives a typically understated performance and his enormously expressive face easily displays all Bernie's emotions, from put-upon worry to cautious happiness and then love. Bernie and Natalie form an unlikely couple, he the square suited, strange-looker and her the pretty young blonde, but this merely serves to reinforce the idea of luck versus controlled destiny. Their bedroom scenes are tender in a desperately lonely way, as the accompanying soundtrack croons, "You may not be an angel 'cos angels are so few, but until the day that one comes along, I'll string along with you."
Stealing the show from all but Macy is Alec Baldwin, who really gets inside the skin of Shelley Kaplow, jerking his arms out straight in front of him in Shelley's shiny suit, sticking his hands in his pockets and jutting out his chin in a confident display of character building. Big, square and formidable he manages to make the brutal Shelley a sympathetic character, hanging on to the old Las Vegas where cheats get their bones broken and the entertainment is a crooner along the lines of Sinatra or Bennet. In a great scene with Paul Sorvino, who plays washed-up junkie singer Buddy Stafford, Buddy tells Shelley about a pack of lions ("it's a pride Buddy, not a pack" says Shelley) whose leader is old and past it and gets challenged by one of the young lions. Should the old guy walk away or stay and fight? It would be easier to walk away, but to do so would be to accept that he's already dead. This story of pride becomes not only a metaphor for the old singer but for Shelley and his outdated concepts.
The Cooler is about losers and no one more so than Bernie Lootz. Writer Hannah has even set-up a website about his alter-ego Mighty Joe Loser which serenades the cult of failure and stamps on the human desire to be a winner, intending to "preach the gospel of loser consciousness". Clearly Hannah (who favours the craps tables apparently when he frequents Las Vegas) has already thought a great deal about the part luck plays in our lives, and the ending of The Cooler is farfetched but not out of step with the rest of the film - luck is either on your side or it ain't.
What keeps The Cooler from losing its lucky streak is the strong and eminently watchable performances from Macy, Baldwin and Bello. Mixing an unlikely romance with the kitsch setting of a timeless Nevada desert casino is as much a signature of the film as the cards, the noise, the ice swirling in a heavy bottomed glass, or Shelley brooding in his dark office staring at CCTV screens, and is what makes the occasionally far-fetched plot twists an acceptable part of this adult dreamland.
Rebecca Kemp
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