Director Edward Berger follows up his Vatican drama Conclave with another movie set within a small city with a distinctive personality. This time it's the Asian gambling mecca of Macau, a cross between the tacky glitz of Las Vegas and the exclusivity of Monte Carlo. It's there we find Lord Doyle (Colin Farrell), a British aristocrat whose opulent hotel room suggests he hit it big at one point on his trip, but he's now fallen heavily into debt.
Except Lord Doyle doesn't actually exist. He's the alias of Reilly, an Irish thief, gambler and con artist who has fled Europe to live an imaginary life on the other side of the world. Along with a local casino hounding him for the $350,000 debt he accrued at their tables, Reilly has been tracked down by Cynthia (Tilda Swinton), a private investigator hired by a British woman from whom Reilly stole almost a million pounds. Finding Cynthia immune to both bribery and his dubious charms, Reilly tries to keep one step ahead of her.
Another woman enters Reilly's life in the form of Dao Ming (Fala Chen), a creditor who uses her seductive charms to convince gamblers to take out credit at heavy interest rates. Dao Ming sees Reilly as a "lost soul" and seems to take pity on him, but her guilt at the suicide of a client means she is unwilling to help Reilly dig a deeper financial hole for himself.
Ballad of a Small Player is never quite sure what type of tale its spinning. It initially seems like a classic story of a desperate man needing to scrape together a large sum of money in a short time frame. That's a well-worn format, yet it's one that's almost always gripping, but Berger and screenwriter Rowan Joffé (adapting Lawrence Osborne's novel) have more weighty themes on their minds. There's an existential element to Ballad of a Small Player that Berger and Joffé struggle to translate to the screen, and we're left asking a lot of questions regarding the plausibility of Reilly's misadventures. For a start, his dime store David Niven routine is laughably transparent, yet only Cynthia seems capable of seeing through it. Are we really to believe that nobody in this world has run a background search, or even simply googled "Lord Doyle?"
Those are the sort of questions that could easily have been avoided had the movie opted for a period setting. But that wouldn't have brushed over the film's other narrative issues, which mostly lie around the figure of Dao Ming. We spend most of the movie wondering why this woman would attach herself to this loser, and when we're given an answer it's one that belongs in a very different film. The film has a supernatural element, drawing on East Asian legends and superstitions, but it's rendered in a way that's less M. Night Shyamalan and more Nicholas Sparks.
Another of the film's issues is that it never seems to make up its mind whether Reilly is actually a good or bad gambler. His favoured casino game is baccarat, which is a game of pure luck that can't be manipulated by any sort of skill or trickery. It makes little sense that a con artist would choose this game over one that involves patterns that might be gamed. There are several contrived moments in which Reilly acts out of character simply because the script needs him to get into more trouble. There's no consistency to his character. Maybe at this point he doesn't know if he's Reilly or Doyle, but the film doesn't seem to know who either of these men are. By the final act the audience is similarly confused as to just what movie we're watching.
Directed by: Edward Berger
Starring: Colin Farrell, Tilda Swinton, Fala Chen
