A psychodrama about the West’s diminishing identity
Set in the gambling casinos of Macau, Ballad of a Small Player presents Colin Farrell portraying a displaced Brit who goes by the facetious title Lord Doyle. He is caught in a spiral of booze, desperation, and gambling addiction. The movie displays his drunken hallucinations as he tries to escape his past in a bewildering present.
Ballad of a Small Player is a modern version of an international co-production — what once was a common feature of post-WWII filmmaking (often Cold War spy stories) shared among nations. Using exotic locales, this production represents globalist insecurity. Farrell’s Lord Doyle carries the guilt of Britain’s 1997 handover of Hong Kong (like Macau, another administrative region of China).
First seen in a green velvet suit (then, later chromatic changes), Doyle is seedy and over-tanned, with a head of thinning hair and a David Niven moustache, once a sign of fake sophistication. He plays the baccarat tables wearing yellow leather gloves (“Savile Row’s finest”) that impress Dao Ming (Fala Chen), a credit broker employed by the casino. Her sad, mysterious beauty stirs his own sense of hope. “I may be a gwai lo [white devil],” he tells her. “But I still have a soul.”
The soul-searching in Ballad of a Small Player is symptomatic of the West’s lost confidence. It is implicit in the non-style of Swiss-German director Edward Berger, a Millennial version of those of Sixties European journeymen (Terence Young, John Guillermin) who excelled at international action-adventures. Berger plays highbrow (All Quiet on the Western Front, Conclave) yet seems to have no personal cinematic signature. Some artistic anomie haunts many contemporary filmmakers, a disorientation embodied by Farrell’s Lord Doyle — a card shark like the one Oscar Isaac played rather vacantly in The Card Counter, one of Paul Schrader’s earnest existential thrillers. There’s a similar blandness to Berger’s tale, though Farrell’s personal intensity keeps the film from seeming routine. The movie sparks when Doyle encounters two other expatriate Brits, con man Adrian Lippett (Alex Jennings) and credit investigator Cynthia Blithe (Tilda Swinton). Both could be figures of Doyle’s imagination except that they penetrate his façade.
World-weary Lippett warns Doyle about the spiritual risks of his globe-trotting sins. “There’s a Chinese phrase ‘dead to shame,’” Lippett tells him. “I am dead to shame. Deep down you’re just an Irish boy way over his head.” And Blithe cuts deeper: “You’re shabby and amateurish. ‘Doyle’ isn’t even a posh name; you couldn’t get that right.” These irksome, entertaining imps add Graham Greene–ish potential to Doyle’s dilemma, exposing his true identity as Brendan Reilly (as though he purposely distanced himself from reality). The Oriental environment, including the deluxe hotel trappings that Doyle/Reilly wantonly devours, elaborates on his sense of displacement. His suffering could happen anywhere, even “the other place,” as Lippett jokingly refers to hell.
Farrell, Jennings, and Swinton taunt each other, playfully exchanging British cynicism and accents. In the film’s wittiest moment, Swinton’s bureaucratic frump transforms into a stylish capitalist, bedecked in couture and an idiosyncratic idea of an Elizabeth I wig. Doyle describes himself as “a foreign ghost cloaked in invisibility, saying, “Here I barely exist. Here I can be whoever I want to be.” That’s his ultimate expression of the white Westerner’s insecurity. It’s a major spiritual crisis writ small.
In Ballad of a Small Player, Berger and screenwriter Rowan Joffe (son of Roland Joffe, director of the Eighties spectacles The Killing Fields and The Mission) focus on a global predicament that’s become so common that they allude to a previous pop myth, Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man,” but without the artistic certainty of that song’s honky-tonk swagger. Dylan’s “Something is happening / But you don’t know what it is” clarifies Doyle/Reilly’s perplexity.
Several recent movies evince the small tragedy of filmmakers who are confused and disoriented by recent social changes that include the decline of Western empires. As with Farrell’s Doyle/Reilly high stakes, these gamblers don’t come to terms with their failing position in globalist reality. They refuse to acknowledge the spiritual tariffs of lost identity. Ballad of a Small Player attests to that pathos.
