The Cooler (Wayne Kramer 2003)
Posted on June 24 at 7.45, 2007 by Eric Mahleb
Las Vegas has to rank as one of the most fascinating and intriguing places on earth, and I am not just saying this because I met my wife there. Any opinion that you might harbor about America, you are likely to find the affirmation of this belief in the characterization of life that permeates this city that never sleeps. And if we have now ‘officially’ entered the age of simulation, where reality has become a malleable commodity that each one of us can shape to his liking, then Bugsy Siegel, who, probably mainly motivated by financial gain, opened his Flamingo Hotel in 1946, should nonetheless be regarded as a pioneer and visionary for understanding the need that human beings have to escape and to exist in alternate realities.
Yet, behind this façade of glass and metal Egyptian Pyramids and Arthurian castles, which provides the ideal larger-than-life environment against which to contrast the ordinary problems of its inhabitants, unfold the old-fashioned lives of what we traditional refer to as real people. And there is probably no one better in Hollywood than William H. Macy to play the ordinary man caught in life’s strange unfoldings.
In The Cooler, Macy plays a gentle, disillusioned and unlucky man whose job as a Cooler involves working the Casino floors and ‘helping’ clients loose money by spreading some of his own bad luck upon them. But when his old-fashioned mobster of a boss, played brilliantly by Alec Baldwin (Baldwin truly excels in tough guy roles as demonstrated recently in The Aviator and The Departed), inadvertently changes his Cooler’s luck, their relationship quickly deteriorates and leads to a series of more or less plausible incidents.
While The Cooler suffers from several inconsistencies, there is a freshness and simplicity about the script and the acting that makes watching this film a very pleasurable experience. It is clearly much smarter than most Hollywood productions and much less arrogant and overbearing that many so-called ‘indie’ productions.
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