The Cooler
Picture:
B Sound: B Extras: B- Film: B
2003 was
a very poor year for feature films, with the studios playing so safe as to be
obnoxious, but the independent filmmakers were still out there making a
difference and one of the best films of that year is The Cooler. The feature
directorial debut of Wayne Kramer is the best film about gambling and Las Vegas since Martin Scorsese’s Casino (1995), a film that said old
Vegas had been killed by corporatism and grave mishandling by organized
crime. The Cooler finds the one last bastion of that old Vegas and tells
its story.
The title
refers to Bernie Lootz (William H. Macy), who is so down on his luck that this
despair and loss is as communicable as SARS.
The person who knows this best is the man using this “talent” to keep
his casino profitable, Shelly Kaplow (Alec Baldwin in fine form), who is his
only friend, sort of. Shelly is old
school and his place is maybe the last holdout of the good old days. Bernie has an idiotic son and idiotic
girlfriend who enter his life, which equals more burden and bad news, and then
there is Natalie (Maria Bello), who goes form being Bernie’s co-worker to
something much more, more enough to threaten his usefulness to Shelly.
Shelly
has problems of his own, with some of his associates trying to get him to sell
out the place to go “modern” and hold onto his older lounge singer (Paul
Sorvino) when these people want him to add a new breed of carbon copy swooner
(Joey Fatone, easily cast). It is a
great set of situations and the screenplay by Frank Hannah and Kramer does an
ace job of juggling all of it, making it all fit, and making it
three-dimensional. This is a film that
should have done far better than it did, but it was a favorite at awards time
and this is a solid DVD that will serve the film well. While audiences were distracted by lame
Fantasy genre films with no point, they missed true mature cinema like
this. If you have not seen it, now you
do not have to miss out.
The
anamorphically enhanced 2.35 X 1 image is nicely shot by James Whitaker, who
has a very welcome grasp of the true value of the scope frame. For this DVD, Video Black is solid, color
range is fine and the depth and clarity is some of the best we have seen on a
new release from any studio in a while.
Arthur Coburn, A.C.E., deserves credit for some impressive editing. That they came up with a film that did not
look like a carbon copy of Scorsese’s work is in itself an achievement, though
Vegas is always Vegas, no matter what era.
The gaudiness, old or new, is a signature. The Dolby Digital 5.1 AC-3 is better than
usual for the film soundtrack, then another 5.1 mix is available isolating Mark
Isham’s score. Three more tracks in the
2.0 configuration offer a Stereo Pro Logic version of the film sound and two
commentary tracks. Kramer is on both,
one with his co-writer and cameraman, the other with composer Isham. There is some overlap and Kramer has an
amusing enthusiasm without knowing it like no director since Paul Verhoeven when
it comes to doing commentaries. Other
extras include two storyboard/final footage comparisons and an installment of
The Sundance Channel’s Anatomy Of A
Scene that deals with this film.
That is a good set of extras, but I was surprised we did not have any
trailers.
As for
Mark Isham, I have not been the biggest fan of his work and part of it has to
do with landing up on projects that are not impressive. On the other hand, his work on Robert
Altman’s Short Cuts, Roger
Donaldson’s remake of The Getaway, Mrs. Parker & The Vicious Circle
(both 1994), Altman’s Gingerbread Man,
Blade (both 1998), and William
Friedkin’s Rules Of Engagement. He can pull of good music without being the
victim of bad commercial cinema, and he does a couple of scores a year currently. If he could just get more mature work like
these films and The Cooler, he could
have a serious artistic breakthrough. As
for Wayne Kramer, his next feature film should be very interesting. That is all the more reason to catch The Cooler, because after all, you
can’t loose!
- Nicholas Sheffo
