Roland Atkinson, M.D.

DR. ROLAND ATKINSON is a professor of psychiatry at Oregon Health and Science University, Portland. For more reviews, visit his Web site at www.AtkinsonOnFilm.com. Share your thoughts with Dr. Atkinson by e-mailing him at cpnews@elsevier.com.

Gambling is on the rise. Legislators increasingly rely on lottery and gaming revenues to balance public budgets. Electronic poker machines are everywhere, and casinos continue to proliferate. William Bennett, America's self-appointed moralist-in-chief, made headlines last May when his multimillion-dollar gambling losses were revealed. Eighty percent of Americans now gamble at least occasionally; perhaps 1%-3% are pathological gamblers, and treatment programs for them are sprouting up. Since films so often mirror other pop cultural trends, there ought to be some good recent movies about gambling, right? Well, in fact, there are few films about gamblers—new or old—and even the best of them can be tedious to watch, like movies about heroin addicts or hard porn. Some pleasures are just better in the doing than in the viewing.

The basic script for gambling dramas unfolds like this. A gambler loses money he cannot afford to lose (it's almost always a man, though one-third of gamblers are women). Next he becomes entrapped in a dialectic spiral of increasingly frantic efforts to borrow or steal money to bankroll ever more desperate gambling strategies (that inevitably fail) as he tries to keep a step ahead of his creditors, who are sometimes pretty nasty folks. The outcome is usually unpleasant—for the gambler and viewer alike. Maybe that's why screenplays featuring gamblers are often built around more suspenseful, less relentlessly negative subplots, like confidence games (as in David Mamet's “House of Games”) or heists (such as Neil Jordan's recent “The Good Thief”). A British Web site catering to gamblers (www.thegoodgamblingguide. co.uk/index.htm) provides reviews of no fewer than 38 feature movies with a gambling theme. But only a handful of these films offer in-depth, unvarnished portrayals of pathological gamblers. I have found just four worth reviewing here. If these films do not qualify as great dramatic successes, they do at least bring to life clinically plausible character studies of gamblers, in a series of vivid, varied portrayals.

If you want a stiff dose of pathological gambling, warts and all, without glamour or subplot niceties, Richard Kwietniowski's 2003 film, “Owning Mahowny,” delivers the goods. Character actor Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Dan Mahowny, a successful young loan officer in a Toronto bank, who likes to bet on the ponies. He gets about $10,000 in debt to his bookie, who pressures him to pay up by refusing him more credit. Feeling cornered, Dan embezzles funds from the bank to cover his debt. Then, discovering how easy it was to take the bank's money, he steals more to win back what he owes, wagering heavily at an Atlantic City casino. He rapidly slides into a vicious cycle of repeated losing and embezzling, a colossal “chase” of such eventual magnitude that he attracts everybody's attention, from casino bosses to the police. Even his clueless, codependent girlfriend Belinda (Minnie Driver, looking dowdy in a long blonde wig) finally catches on that her man may have a bit of a problem.

Hoffman shows us three special features of Mahowny's pathological gambling style: First, he is utterly joyless, applying himself with austere grimness at the tables, eschewing food, drink or the attention of others, and showing neither pleasure nor pain when he wins or loses. He's a card-carrying journeyman compulsive in action. Second, he displays serious denial. “I don't have a gambling problem, I have a financial problem,” Dan patiently tells everyone. And third, he shows moral and interpersonal bankruptcy to match his financial woes. As in severe addictions, love, honor, loyalty, and honesty—all pale before Dan's need to keep on gambling. Near the end Belinda tells Dan that she loves him. She means it. When Dan replies mechanically that he loves her too, the chilling shallowness of his reply betrays his incapacity to love, a moment that defines Mahowny's impoverished personality.

How clinically accurate is Hoffman's depiction of pathological gambling? Tough question. I've been speaking of Dan Mahowny's pathological gambling as if this disorder is widely accepted as a variant of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). It is not. DSM-IV lists pathological gambling in an odd little cluster called “impulse-control disorders not elsewhere classified,” shared with such odd bedfellows as trichotillomania and pyromania. There are equally convincing arguments for categorizing pathological gambling as either an impulse disorder or an addiction, according to a recently published report , Pathological Gambling:A Critical Review, sponsored by the National Research Council (Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 1999).

In my experience, which includes consulting to an outpatient gambling treatment program, pathological gambling comes in assorted flavors. The analogy to substance dependence is hard to resist, when behaviors like preoccupation, loss of control, and subjective symptoms suggestive of “tolerance” and “withdrawal” are prominent. For some gamblers, wagering is one element in an addictive mélange that can also include alcohol, tobacco, drugs, and sex. But for others, it is a matter of mood, gambling to escape depression or dysphoria, or during a manic episode. Some are “action junkies”—the drama and excitement of gaming counts most for them, though research has not shown that thrill seeking is all that common among pathological gamblers. Antisocial and even criminal behavior patterns may be associated with persistent heavy gambling lifestyles. While OCD is not mentioned in the DSM-IV account, of interest are a few published reports that some gamblers with an OCD-like pattern do exist and may respond with diminished gambling behavior to medications for OCD. What separates compulsive gambling from most cases of OCD, of course, is that an extreme external stimulus (increasing debt) nips at the gambler's heels, while the pressure for obsessive and compulsive symptoms in typical OCD comes from within, the result of psychological aberration or brain dysfunction. Who owns Mahowny, after all? Is it his inner demons or his gambling creditors?

Given the heterogeneity among pathological gamblers, it is fitting that the best movies about gamblers do not portray a common stereotype. In Karel Reisz's 1974 film, “The Gambler,” James Caan plays Axel Freed, a popular college professor who is also a pathological gambler. Unlike Dan Mahowny, he is charismatic and highly impulsive. He articulates a sense of omnipotence that has been described as characteristic of some pathological gamblers. “I've got magic powers,” Axel says at one point when he continues to gamble despite mounting debts. “I'm scorching. I'm hot as a pistol.” He also speaks of his quest for excitement. “I like the threat of losing … I love to win, of course … but if all my bets were safe ones, there wouldn't be any ‘juice.’” Freed looks sexy but, like Mahowny, he avoids sex. He's not joyless like Dan, but for Axel, roulette and craps trump the pleasures offered by his girlfriend (a nubile Lauren Hutton).

John Dahl's 1998 film, “Rounders,” is about men who earn their living by moving among high stakes poker games in Manhattan. Some, like Mike (Matt Damon), are impetuous and inconsistent; they win and lose big, and express contempt for the conservative pros who eke out a modest but steady living. Mike calls them “grinds”—like the character played here by John Turturro. Others, like Mike's hotheaded buddy, “Worm” (Edward Norton), cheat. Now a reformed rounder, Mike attends law school, but eventually he returns to the tables to help Worm pay off debts and thus avoid serious bodily injury or worse. Mike loses his money, girlfriend, and standing in law school, but in an odd twist, encouraged and staked to play again by one of his law professors, Mike gains confidence in using his ability to perceive subtle cues that give away the strength of other players' hands (called “the tell”), and he begins to win more consistently. Damon is very good here; he gives wonderfully subtle shape to Mike's gradually emerging confidence in his own ability to play straight and win. Whether his self-estimate as a reader of people is justified, or simply another example of a gambler's omnipotent fantasizing, is never entirely clear.

“Croupier,” made by British director Mike Hodges in 1998, is probably the best-crafted drama among these films. Jack (Clive Owen, lean and haunted here, like a young Laurence Harvey), a man literally born in a casino, son of a professional South African gambler and a former croupier himself, tries to shed his past by moving to London, where he wants to become a novelist. Strapped for cash and blocked in his writing, Jack reluctantly acquiesces when his father calls to say he's lined up a job for his son in a London gaming club. Back in the casino atmosphere, Jack finds himself pulled irresistibly into the amoral yet alluring life that permeates the club. He begins to violate rules forbidding fraternization with staff or patrons, especially after meeting two provocative women, one a mysterious gambler, the other a sexually bold dealer. To be precise about it, this film, like Paul Thomas Anderson's “Hard Eight,” or the recent release starring William H. Macy, “The Cooler,” is not so much the study of a gambler as it is a drama set in the gambling demimonde. But “Croupier” has a psychological depth that is lacking in most such films. When Jack begins to write again, this time it's about “Jake,” an unprincipled croupier who represents Jack's darker side. It's not as if Jack isn't taking chances. He is gambling, but the stakes here are his integrity and his soul, not money. Jack's internal struggle—between attempting to live up to the high moral standard he has set for himself vs. the lying and cheating style of the inveterate gambler (his father's style)—is the central story here. It is a well-nuanced, psychodynamically intriguing quandary. External events make the ending somewhat helter skelter, but the visuals are spellbinding. Mirrors are used ingeniously, and wonderful camera angles abound. The result is an atmosphere thick with the tensions and false glitter of casino life, made more real here than in any other film I can recall.