Since graduating from being a mostly TV director to unexpectedly sweeping awards shows with All Quiet on the Western Front in 2022, Edward Berger has quickly become one of the more prolific prestige directors around. With Conclave scoring big with audiences, critics, and awards voters just last year and a Bourne sequel/reboot under his direction being planned as we speak, Berger has also found time for Ballad of a Small Player, another grand and expensive-looking adventure that never has the feeling of being rushed to it. Certainly sillier than his previous two efforts, and thus also less likely to put him back in any sort of Oscars conversation, it’s an effectively glitzy and stressful trip to Macau fuelled by a fabulously watchable performance from Colin Farrell.
As posh English gambler Lord Freddy Doyle, Farrell gets to play a role within a role to consistently fun effect. See, Lord Doyle is the cover identity for quick-thinking Irish fraudster Brendan Reilly, and Farrell has a blast switching between his natural accent and that of a mannered old-money aristocrat as he loses disastrous sums of money in Macau’s casinos, all while on the run from the UK authorities, represented by persistent PI Blithe (Tilda Swinton).
As any good gambling tale needs to be, Ballad of a Small Player is, at its best, horribly stressful, Farrell sweating, bluffing, and screaming his way through baccarat tables, sometimes winning big but mostly being bled dry in a city that has grown sick and tired of him. Doyle/Reilly is drowning in debts and Rowan Joffe’s script, adapting the novel from Lawrence Osborne, is very astute on the language of the desperate addict – everything Farrell says, especially in the Doyle identity, just drips with wretched failure and chaos. It’s another fantastic performance from Farrell, not the equal of his career-best work in Banshees of Inisherin but still a very fine addition to what has been a great decade of credits for him after his revivifying work with Yorgos Lanthimos.
Macau itself also shines bright here, a glamorously cinematic but also deeply alien setting. Glittering high-rises give way to swampy beaches and, no matter the price of entry, every place here feels dangerously easy to disappear (or be disappeared) in. Sadly, its Chinese inhabitants do feel a little short-changed though – Doyle/Reilly’s quasi-romance with local casino worker Dao Ming (Fala Chen) is very hard to buy into, and the jumps into Chinese spiritualism and Buddhist mythology are visually interesting but mostly half-hearted.
A tale of compulsive excess – look out for some revolting binge-eating scenes and a fun running gag of Reilly being forced to pretend to have expensive tastes as Doyle – Ballad of a Small Player is vulgar and very, very loud. It’s another intriguing shift in setting and style for Berger, who is becoming one of the most reliable journeymen in the business and while it’s not as rich and involving as either All Quiet or Conclave, it’s another immersive trip from a director who really knows how to get the most out of his sets. Oh, and if the idea of Colin Farrell and Tilda Swinton disco dancing together appeals to you (and why wouldn’t it), stick around for the credits.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 