Ballad Of A Small Player Review | Colin Farrell Cannot Lift Edward Berger’s Flashy Annoyance

A washed-up gambler in Macau tells his story in Edward Berger’s Ballad Of A Small Player. In the opening, Colin Farrell’s ‘Lord’ Doyle introduces himself as “a high roller”, presently on a “slippery slope”. When we first meet him, he’s blown all his bets. He’s run out of luck, staggering from his hotel room to the casino floor, where lives are made and shattered. He has just three days to clear a mountain of debt else the police will barge in. Ballad Of A Small Player corrals around Doyle flinging himself through rounds of baccarat (which he calls “the prince of card games”) in modes of self-destruction as well as reconstruction. One chance or measured flick of the cards can bring about a wild spin. Zesty camera movements flip open his smooth-talking as he navigates spaces no longer willing to trust him. With swishing, unapologetic dazed glamour, Berger summons a tantalizing Macau—drunk on bottomless avarice. In a candy-colored explosion of fluorescent and neon lighting, we’re sucked into a dreamy, deadly world, yet one also curiously defanged of personality.

Farrell puts up such a desperate, go-for-broke avatar, it’s tough not to be moved. It’s equally hard not to be utterly sorry over his wasted vigor in getting this damned thing going. Farrell’s over-exertions cannot disguise this project’s calamitous underpinnings. James Friend’s camera pushes up punishingly tight and close on Doyle at his most vulnerable—the edge of sanity. As much as you want to applaud Farrell for baring it all, the whole thing is a tonal scramble. The intensity of Doyle’s emotional duress sits awkwardly with a complete detachment between the viewer and him.

This adaptation of Lawrence Osborne’s eponymous 2014 novel keeps pumping out scenarios wherein Doyle reassures himself of tides turning. The gulf grows until you are left unbothered with whatever goes down with him. Doyle gets entangled with one of the casino ladies, a fixer and loan shark, Dao Ming (Fala Chen in a beautifully centered, confidently affecting turn). This tragedy-infused track sets him up for redemption, but it’s hewn with manufactured turns. Despite Chen’s soothing presence, Ming barely moves beyond being a cultural envoy guiding Doyle about the Festival of the Hungry Ghosts, whose linked significance to his crisis couldn’t be more overt. Suddenly, Tilda Swinton also pops up as a detective tasked with nabbing Doyle. Swinton dons the umpteen wig in her storied galley.

The bright, gaudy pops of color leaking through every frame are irresistibly alluring. They give off the heady effect gambling has on Doyle–rather the taste of luxuriously remaking destiny enticing all stepping into Macau. You get how meticulously Friend and production designer Jonathan Houlding have harnessed dizzyingly variegated colors. It’s feverishly intoxicating but also painfully lumbering. Berger seems bewitched by his own delirious stew. At times, the world seems displaced from reality to fantasy—a psychedelic assortment folded into Doyle’s delusions. The overwrought visual energy is ill-suited for a marked absence of thought and philosophy in Rowan Joffe’s screenplay. There are these bursts of interiority delivered through clunky dialogues. Characters commiserate with and take jibes at each other over being “lost souls”. Suicide runs as a thread throughout. Doyle’s fate is constantly primed as self-negation. Would he do the deed–give up on luck–or hold on just a little longer? This tussle is hammered persistently without fresh dividends. Instead, you get a tiringly obvious narrative around a man in his abscesses, trying to get back to his prime.

Clearly, this is a world of excess. However, the director is only half-committed. He leans into man’s ravenous greed but forgets debauchery. A place is evoked in rich, bold strokes, but characters are mostly ditched at the awning. It’s one thing for the viewer to be taken solely through the protagonist’s sinking fortunes; quite another, when his shifts seem unmoored from any sense of past. Yes, Doyle has fallen on hard straits. No one may like being around a loser. But we are merely air-dropped as Doyle hurtles from one swinging final bid to another. You cannot help but wish the film wove his journey more fluidly with Macau’s many secret parallel worlds within. There are refrains here of an afterlife—a criminal seeking salvation—that might as well remain forever elusive.

Early in the film, Doyle talks of the joys of being a “foreign ghost” in Macau. He can shapeshift, be whoever he wants. This is a fugitive, by turns sure and flailing in his convictions of escaping punishment for his sins. But he also confesses it’ll take no less than a miracle to change him. He pursues the tail end of his own undoing. Ballad Of A Small Player mottles this with spiritual and existential reckonings, but they don’t extrude out of the glitter. Berger dials up a dark, garish, grotesque comedy, replete with bizarrely warped angles. But it’s never enough to sustain interest, intrigue or momentum. The film judders in predictable directions—a final turnaround that springs too abruptly to be plausible or moving. The degeneracy in the film stays placid and mannered, too curated to break through with real manic glee.