When A24 distributed writer-director Paul Schrader’s film First Reformed (2017), there was talk that it would be the last film he ever made. Schrader had recently turned 70. The critical and financial success of First Reformed — complete with Schrader’s first-ever Academy Award nomination for its screenplay — would have made it a high note on which to end his career. It even satisfied his desire to make a film in the “transcendental style” of directors like Yasujirō Ozu, Robert Bresson, and Carl Theodor Dreyer that had fascinated him since he wrote a book entitled Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer when he was in his early twenties. Indeed, Schrader himself noted that directing a film like that would be a fitting way for him to end his career as early as a seminar he conducted at the American Film Institute’s campus in Los Angeles in the late 1970s.
But Schrader decided that he didn’t want to retire. Instead, he wrote and directed The Card Counter (2021), which feels like both a compendium of the traits that make up his best work as well as a commentary on them. Anyone can appreciate this film, but if you’re an admirer of Schrader’s work, you’ll find a lot to appreciate. That helps make it a perfect example of a type of film that I like to call “another one.”
For me, “another one” is a film from a great director or writer that might not be well known because of the other incredible films in their vast body of work but is of high quality and bears all the trademarks of their artistic voice. That phrase comes from an interview that Michael Cera did with Criterion Collection founder Pete Becker. When talking about Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s sprawling body of work, Cera noted the feeling of surprise and pleasure he gets when he sees that “there’s another one” of his films which is going to be great and important to him. Examples of “another one” in the filmographies of other great directors include The Adventures of TinTin (2011, directed by Steven Spielberg), 3 Godfathers (1948, directed by John Ford), and Bringing Out the Dead (1999, directed by Martin Scorsese but written by Schrader). All of those films would be more highly regarded if their directors hadn’t made more famous films, and they all have many hallmarks of what made them well known.
The Card Counter’s protagonist is William Tell (Oscar Isaac), who shares many traits with Schrader’s other male lead characters. He has a dark past (in this case, time spent torturing inmates at Abu Ghraib prison), an occupation which is a reflection of his methodical nature and an extension of his loneliness (poker player), and a need to write down his thoughts in a journal, which we hear in voiceover. Schrader calls this character, and the type of film in which he appears, a “man in a room” as a reference to his loneliness and the fact that he spends a lot of time alone in a room. Tell has his own unique traits — like covering the furniture in his motel rooms in white cloth — but he is just as unmistakably a protagonist created by Schrader as Pastor Ernst Toller in First Reformed or Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (1976).
The journey that Tell goes on is also reminiscent of other films written and directed by Schrader. Like Pastor Toller, who sought to help a man who felt crippling eco-anxiety, Tell is jolted out of a life devoted to his specific routine by a younger person. In this case, it’s Cirk (Tye Sheridan), the son of a soldier who was also at Abu Ghraib. He wants Tell’s help in torturing his former superior, Major John Gordo (Willem Dafoe), whom he blames for driving his father to suicide. Tell tries to help Cirk, just as Pastor Toller tried to do or how Bickle tried to help underage sex worker Iris (Jodie Foster) escape from a life of exploitation. But like in those other films, the plans of these protagonists will lead them in different directions than they expected, even if they still offer them a chance at some type of redemption.
It’s especially interesting to analyze The Card Counter as an example of “another one” in Schrader’s filmography because of all the commentary it contains on the concept of routines. Early on, Tell notes that he “liked the routine” of prison and how it made him do the “same activities at the same time every day.” Later, after seeing how most of his time is spent playing poker, his manager La Linda (Tiffany Haddish) tells Tell that he should consider doing other things. He pauses and says, “I like playing cards.” That line feels like it could refer to Schrader’s propensity for making “man in a room” films, as well as his fans who continue to watch them. Tell’s devotion to his job feels like Schrader’s commitment to his “man in a room” sub-genre, and Schrader includes criticism of that same level of commitment when he has Cirk say that Tell’s routine is “all the same… I don’t really feel like it’s going anywhere.”
But The Card Counter does go somewhere, in this case a typically dark finale like that of many of Schrader’s other films. But before it gets there, it’s worth pointing out that part of the fun of “another one” is seeing how it manages to achieve its own identity while being faithful to the tropes of its director’s body of work. In this instance, some of the things which distinguish this film from Schrader’s others are its mesmerizing performance by Oscar Isaac; warm performance by Haddish, the latest in a long line of comedians who gave dramatic performances for Schrader like Richard Pryor and Cedric the Entertainer; and the brilliantly disorienting way that Schrader films the flashbacks to Abu Ghraib. Even the ending — which is Schrader’s third film that pays homage to the final scene of a film he loves called Pickpocket (1959) — feels stripped-down and elemental in a way that it didn’t in American Gigolo (1980) and Light Sleeper (1992). That variation is the type of thing you get when you allow an artist to continue to keep working with themes and images which are fascinating to them over the course of a body of work which has spanned decades.
Schrader is now 76 years old, but he has no plans of retiring. His next film, Master Gardener (2023), follows another loner with a troubled past who is devoted to his job (this time a horticulturist) and tries to save a younger person from a dark fate. Schrader also has plans to film an adaptation of a novel called Foregone this summer. It’s nice to know that, even before his next film has been released, he is going to make at least another one.
The Card Counter will be screened at IU Cinema on April 27 with producer Braxton Pope scheduled to be present for a post-film Q&A.
Filmmaker Paul Schrader visited the Cinema in 2011 as part of the Jorgensen Guest Filmmaker series.
Jesse Pasternack is a graduate of Indiana University. During his time at IU, Jesse was the co-president of the Indiana Student Cinema Guild. He also wrote about film, television, and pop culture for the Indiana Daily Student. Jesse has been a moderator at Michael Moore’s Traverse City Film Festival and is a friend of the Doug Loves Movies podcast. An aspiring professional writer-director, his own film work has appeared at Campus Movie Fest and the Anthology Film Archives in New York City.