Hard Eight
Paul Thomas Anderson seems to have two speeds. His films are either small and intimate or big and epic. His first feature film, Hard Eight, is the former PT Anderson, the one with a small budget and an even smaller cast. The story is simple but rewarding, and though there are a couple of "first time director" problems, there is enough talent and skill on display here to show what Anderson would be capable of.
The story for Hard Eight is simple: Sydney (Philip Baker Hall) is a professional gambler and high roller, and he comes across a down and out John (John C. Reilly), alikable schmuck with some problems, one of them being a serious lack of cash money (his most pressing problem being the need for $6,000 to bury his mother). Sydney mysteriously takes a liking to John and takes John under his wing, showing him how to get by in a town like Vegas and how to use his head to get what he needs. Eventually, John comes to view Sydney as a father and vice versa. Sydney also meets a young cocktail waitress named Clementine (Gwenyth Paltrow ) and takes a shining to her in a fatherly way, and eventually Sydney has himself a little makeshift family. And what happens when family members screw up? Who do they turn to? Family, of course.
The cast is awesome. John C. Reilly shows that he can do a lot more than be Will Ferrell's sidekick. He does play a bumbling idiot, but it's a more grounded performance and not over the top cartoony. Reilly has acting chops and gets to show them off here. Philip Baker Hall is great, and gets the most screen time and story devotion, as it's pretty much the story of his character and why he does what he does for John and Clementine. Paltrow isn't given too much to do as Clementine except act a little unstable, but she creates empathy for a character that could have easily come across as crazy and unlikable. Samuel L. Jackson has a few scenes as a hustler friend of John's named Jimmy, and his character really has two purposes. He's the anti-Sydney, which causes Sydney to not like him, but in the end there seems to be more in common between them than Sydney would care to admit. And Jimmy serves as a pure plot device, Mr. James Exposition, doling out a little bit of explanation and doing his best to get the drama going and the keep the story moving forward. Finally, Philip Seymour Hoffman (billed as his alias Phillip Seymour Hoffman, perhaps while he was in the witness protection program) has one scene as an over enthusiastic and terribly obnoxious craps player, and his presence in the movie really just points out the obvious lack of additional Hoffman (which Anderson rectified with movies like Boogie Nights and Punch Drunk Love).
But this movie isn't perfect, despite Anderson's seemingly natural ability to direct. First time writer/director-types often run into the problem of having a couple of scenes run a little long, like six or seven minutes too long. Generally, most scenes are about three to five minutes tops, and then we're moving on. A scene that lasts about ten minutes or more can be murder for a movie's pacing, especially if it's all in one location. It takes a ballsy and intense movie to make something like that work. How many different angles of talking characters can there be? After five minutes, the camera has lingered on each character in as many different ways as possible, the location has become boring and there's a feeling of "let's move things along" that can't be avoided.
Besides the simple “first timer” problems of Hard Eight, there is plenty in between that makes the movie soar. The opening exchanges between John and Sydney are great, as Sydney appears to be some sort of mysterious guardian angel, and John calls him out on his apparent random kindness, wondering aloud if Sydney was trying to make sexual advances on him. And slowly John realizes that Sydney is not hitting on him, but instead really seems to care about John (at least enough to show him how to survive a night in Vegas on $50 and get everything he needs). There’s a great moment when Sydney is driving John to Vegas, and John is sitting in the backseat because he doesn’t trust Sydney yet. But during the drive, John feels like an idiot for sitting in the backseat of the car like Sydney was some sort of chauffeur, and he asks to switch to the front seat. And these early scenes of Sydney and John slowly connecting brings a lot of weight to the third act of the movie, which involves the final reveal of Sydney’s reasons for helping John, and really throws Sydney for a loop when he is confronted with this reason by hustler Jimmy. Needless to say, Sydney did something back east in Atlantic City that sent him out west to the desert and if John found out what that was, he would most likely have a very different and less fatherly opinion of the old man.
So Hard Eight is awesome, especially if you are curious about where the director of There Will Be Blood got his start. It’s a small character-based movie and it works very well. Great acting, solid direction and a good score combine to make an amazing feature film debut. Many directors only have one good movie in them, at the most, but Anderson knocks his first one out of the park and went on to make even better flicks in the subsequent decade.
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