Owning Mahowny

Saw Owning Mahowny. It was a sort of intentionally boring noir. The plot follows Dan Mahowny, a compulsive gambler who happens to work at a bank. Of course he begins working the bank system to cover his bets. He borrows against the credit of various millionaire clients of the bank. The casino he frequents (inexplicably in Atlantic City, whereas he lives in Toronto) is happy to accept his money and courts him with limo rides and free ribs, even promoting a kitchen-worker to Mahowny's personal servant. The film plays Mahowny as a man with absolutely no interests in life at all. He refuses the courting of the casino and is usually shown walking through gray, identical hallways in gray shapeless suits, never sleeping, never eating. He seems uninterested in anything. When we get to the casino, everything is bright light and lush color (well, lush-er color. It's not obvious enough to tip the film's hand) and he adopts this tightly-controlled, profusely sweating demeanor as the loa of his addiction rides him.

The film hits the sensible plot-points of gambling movies: he tells someone to take his winnings and keep them safe from him "no matter what I say" and then demands the money back later, amid veiled threats. His girlfriend finds out about his addiction and is at first frank and hopeful and then despairing in the face of his disinterest in stopping. Soon he's gambling away tens of thousands of dollars per hand of poker and the feds are hot on his tail. None of this is played for high drama though. There's a lot of stunned, frozen silences and blank stares. The one time there is dramatic dialogue (an argument with the girlfriend) it feels canned and phoney. I feel realism is not what the film is after but rather that Lynchian deliberate feel.

There's a sub-theme contrasting his petty gambling with the infinitely more high-stakes gambling of the banks. One of the opening scenes shows the spinning wheel of a bank vault's door while the sound of a roulette wheel plays. One of the executives talks of fleecing a rich client and says "it's a bit of a gamble." There's not enough of this sort of thing to become really condemnatory or anything. It felt more free-associative / exploratory than anything to me. There's also some condemnation heaped on the slimy casino director (who bears a strong and I think purposeful resemblance to Reagan) for bending over backwards to allow Mahowny to lose even more of other people's money at his tables. (This is a thing which actually happens, btw. Gambling addicts are good customers for casinos. They're very catered-to and often given free stuff. This American Life did a bit on it.)