This week on Please Don’t Make Me Invoke Mortdecai Theatre is Ballad of a Small Participant (now on Netflix), a gruesomely overstylized mess of a movie directed by Edward Berger, starring Colin Farrell as a bottom-of-the-slopbucket playing addict and Tilda Swinton as a forgettable no matter of a personality, which is one thing I assumed I’d never-in-a-million-years see. That this factor is such a milieu is a shock contemplating Berger’s earlier two movies, the gripping 2022 adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Entrance and the visually arresting actorly showcase that was 2024’s Conclave, earned huge piles of Oscar noms. Small Participant’s literary origin – it’s primarily based on Lawrence Osborne’s acclaimed 2014 novel – is the one factor it has in widespread with these two movies, each of which have been fairly wonderful. Which is to say, there’s some actual what-the-hell vitality with this unusual, eyeball-scorching bewilderment of a film.
The Gist: Lord Doyle (Farrell) is moist. Continuously. He wakes up moist, goes to mattress moist, walks round all day moist. Beads on his brow dribble all the way down to his eyebrows which redirect them to turn out to be a slickness on the cheeks, and I haven’t even gotten round to describing his neck but. The dampness appears to be a (absolutely pungent) melange of chilly sweat, meat sweats, booze sweat, flop sweat, South Pacific humidity and piss-warm night rain. The purpose being, I imagine, is that if he ever dried out, he’d be much less slippery. It’s what you name a metaphor.
He clothes posh in velvet jackets, with a mustache that solely John Waters ought to put on and a pair of yellow “good luck” gloves that clearly don’t all the time work. His fancy lodge room is wrecked with bottles and plates and glasses and crumpled napkins and tossed bits of clothes, all signifiers that the man is a Troubled Film Character, Playing Version, identical to empty beer cans and half-eaten cartons of Chinese language meals strewn round a spartan condominium inform us {that a} Troubled Film Character is a Unhappy Divorced Cop, Estranged From His Daughter. Shocker, Lord Doyle isn’t his actual title. He’s an Englishman on the lam in Macau for causes to be revealed later. He pretends to be huge time however is actually a pathetic man who sometimes envisions himself stepping off the highest of a tall constructing. He’s received PROBLEMS.
“Right here, I barely exist,” he says in voiceover. “Right here, I could be whoever I need to be.” However is Lord Doyle actually who he desires to be? A determined and remoted shell of a human who owes $352k to the lodge (OK, that’s solely Hong Kong {dollars}, which is 40-some grand) and rides the intense social-emotional-financial rollercoaster of playing at baccarat? The locals name him a “gwailo,” which interprets to “overseas ghost” and appears to be pejorative, just like Mexicans calling White people “gringo.” And that’s how he defines himself, too, which makes him an actual deal with to be round. We’ll spend 100 minutes with this man and can study practically nothing about him besides that he binge-gambles – and binge-eats in a hideously disgusting method – and lives for the all-too-brief increase whereas largely present miserably in a state of anxious bust. However at this level, the increase doesn’t appear to be practically sufficient for his bottomless appetites.
Lord Doyle meets two ladies who may virtually shake him from his gross little rut. Cynthia (Swinton) is a personal investigator/bland plot system despatched by events again in England to gather money owed from our protag, however hey, a minimum of she clothes midway like a clown. And Dao Ming (Fala Chen) is a on line casino hostess who affords shlubs like Lord Doyle loans to allow them to lose much more cash on the card tables. He defends Dao Ming throughout a confrontation, and takes a punch for his hassle, and that’s apparently sufficient for her to, I dunno, just like the man? Take a shine to him? Really feel sorry for him? He appears unimaginable to like, his each twitch and mannerism screaming DANGER, DO NOT ENGAGE. “You and I are the identical,” she says, and that’s a granddaddy of a whopper of a whale that you simply and I’ll by no means swallow, as a result of not like Lord Doyle, she doesn’t recurrently crumple to the ground throughout panic assaults or appear to be the thing of the film’s clearly out-of-control spritzing specialist, who virtually definitely received paid per squirt. Dao Ming babe, you’re simply far too dry for this man. He’s a fish out of water, damp and gasping and flopping round helplessly, and there are many different fish within the sea.
What Films Will It Remind You Of?: Right here it’s: Ballad of a Small Participant takes the playing misfortunes/adventures of Proudly owning Mahowny or The Card Counter, borrows rudimentary construction and darkish themes from Leaving Las Vegas and makes its major character a sopping variation of Mortdecai.
Efficiency Value Watching: Small Participant finds Farrell sporting droplets of moisture like he wore prosthetics in The Batman and The Penguin. You may’t assist however respect his efforts even when he’s handed a nothing of a cliche of a personality surrounded by visible extra.
Memorable Dialogue: A late-night alternate takes a stab at profundity:
Dao Ming: Have you ever heard of the Buddhist hell?
Doyle: Naraka.
Dao Ming: The Realm of the Hungry Ghosts is for individuals pushed by greed. They’ve enormous mouths and skinny necks, and regardless of how a lot they eat or drink, they’ll by no means be glad.
Intercourse and Pores and skin: None.
Our Take: So. How invested are we in Lord Doyle’s well-being, which is tied to him paying off appreciable money owed? The higher query is perhaps, why does Ballad of a Small Participant battle so mightily to speak primary notions of plot and character with any readability? The movie may very well be a cautionary story about narratives with ethically questionable protagonists; it fails to ascertain Lord Doyle as something greater than a bundle of tics and dangerous choices, and as we try and discern whether or not the character is price redemption – and even our baseline curiosity – he falls into the Who Cares Crevasse, with nary a twig or crumbling handhold to rescue him from our indifference.
Berger compensates for his protagonist’s lack of charisma – once more, not Farrell’s fault – by directing the residing shit out of the film. The overstated squeak of Doyle’s gloves as he bends the sting of a taking part in card to get a peek at it’s offered as an audio/visible/tactile fetish, an entry level for his glistening pores and skin and, ultimately, the putrid method during which he slurps and masticates a room-service feast. All the things concerning the manufacturing is extreme – the sound design, the intrusive rating, the quasi-phantasmagorical visuals. We get it: With their veneer of glamour overlaying emotional vacuums, locations like Macau and Vegas are ideally suited settings for flimsy losers like Doyle to flame and/or peter out with a giant bang or a collection of unhappy little whimpers. The setting right here is opulent, glitzy, bursting with coloration; on one hand, it’s spectacular, and on the opposite, it’s pointlessly extravagant. Berger doesn’t appear to be capturing the setting to create a temper or feeling, as a substitute exploiting its cheesy magnificence for his personal indulgence.
The unbridled overkill of this factor solely brings additional consideration to a plot that muddles its approach to Doyle’s One Huge Rating, one final all-or-nothing hand of baccarat that even he doesn’t imagine will resolve his issues, that are deeper than simply paying off individuals who need to imprison, beat up or possibly even kill him. I imply, he apparently desires to kill himself first, so nothing scares him. The nihilistic core of the character finally ends up being the narrative focus; there was a degree, after sifting by means of the half-assed Dao Ming/Doyle dynamic, grazed-against implications of supernatural hoodoo and the hardly realized shadows of Lynchian dreamstates, once I requested myself whether or not this was a love story or a thriller or a personality research, and I couldn’t inform. Berger fills our eyeballs with a lot stuff that he appears to have forgotten about his concepts and characters, who’re reflections of ethical emptiness, hopelessness and cynicism. Our solely hope for this film is that it’s over quickly – and in the end, we’ve management over that.
Our Name: Ballad of a Small Participant is an empty wank of a film. I’m considerably irritated. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a contract author and movie critic primarily based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
