The road to cinematic adaptation of literary classics is paved with good intentions and monumental misunderstandings, broadly validating the film industry's conventional wisdom to the effect that good movies only come out of bad novels and vice versa. Without much research or statistical evidence, the road to the remake seems to The MacMahonian to be perhaps sunnier: not to mention the silent era and up to the 30s, when it was standard practice, one needs only to think of C B de Mille's consecutive takes at the Ten Commandments (1923 and 1956, respectively), Howard Hawks´ genial triptych of successive self-remakes (Rio Bravo, 1959, El Dorado, 1966 and Rio Lobo, 1970), or more recently the modern takes on The Planet of the Apes (Tim Burton, 2001) or Bad Lieutenant (Werner Herzog, 2009), which generally matched and often surpassed the originals, to name but a few. Reverse case in point: The Gambler.
The Gambler is Rupert Wyatt's 3rd feature film, after The Escapist (2008), which I didn’t see, and Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), which I saw but can no longer tell apart from the other instalments of the series from the Tim Burton one onwards.
The Gambler tells the story of Jim Bennett (Mark Wahlberg, worthily almost succeeding at not succumbing to the film's general histrionics) a young man who has it all: upper class WASPish background, looks, brains (he very unorthodoxly “teaches” English Literature at college) but in spite or because of this is affected by an irritating über-self-indulgence which makes him espouse an all-or-nothing view of existence: he tells his students to drop out unless they're certified literary geniuses (in classroom scenes with no dramatic value other than to “explain” Jim's character and introduce his love interest Amy, played by Brie Larson) and concurrently tries to obtain the money he thinks he needs to be free to lead the life he thinks he wants to lead – the celebrated “fuck you money”, eloquently expounded in one scene by loan-shark Frank, played by John Goodman – by borrowing money from African-American and Korean gangs (besides bumming his family and friends´ lifetime savings) to gamble in casinos – a course of action most people would avoid. To his credit, he has the guts to match his spoilt rich kid attitude and (spoiler alert), after a couple of casino setbacks and close encounters with his creditors´ bad mood, incredibly finally succeeds in his quest and even finds True Love in the process.
A few entertaining if vacuous cool neo-noir dialogue scenes partially compensate for loads of existential posturing a la film-school freshman trying to imitate bad Antonioni. Opening credits say the film is based on James Toback's eponymous, to my knowledge a novel presentation of a remake (mercifully they didn't go for “palimpsest”, which would have been more in tune with the tone of the project…) and besides a just tribute to a director to whom not enough credit is given.
So The Gambler is kind of like The Gambler (Toback, 1974) meets The Gambler (Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 1867) to unremarkable, borderline incompetent (preposterous final scene with Jim literally running all night to his beloved's apartment, instead of taking a tax or something) effect.