The Music Of Chance

To some viewers The Music Of Chance will be a slight film and in many ways it is.  On the way to New York, James Nashe (Mandy Patinkin) picks up a beaten-up stranger Jack Pozzi (James Spader). \Jack explains how he was robbed of the ten-thousand dollars he needs to get in on a poker game with a couple of wealthy upstate losers, Bill Flower and Willy Stone (Charles Durning and Joel Grey). James offers to stake Jack the money for a 50-50 split of the profit but when James gets wiped out by his opponents, the two end up paying off their debt by building a huge stone wall under the watchful eye of groundsman Calvin Murks (M. Emmet Walsh).

Adapted from a 1990 novel "The City of The World' by Paul Auster (who appears as the driver at the end of the film) which I have not read, despite the fact that it refuses to adhere to conventional expectations when it comes to plot,The Music of Chance is a compelling experience, with director Haas maintaining a sense of overarching foreboding to the purposefully oblique narrative.

Starting out rather like David Mamet’s House Of Games what initially appeared to be a talky film about grifters and rootless souls settles into a (perhaps allegorical)tale of existential suspension as Jack and James find themselves compelled to fulfill a mechanical and pointless task in order to honour their debt to men who live in a world of their own (almost literally so in Willie's case).

Given Haas's decision to give the film a different name from the originary text, it would have helped if he had developed its implications in his adaptation but despite a key conversation between Jack and James late in the film, which delineates the latter as a philosophical pragmatist as opposed to Jack's aleatory determinist its implications, particularly in the music allusion, remain largely obscure.

The performances are strong. Durning and Grey only appear at the beginning of the film leaving the field to Spader who is convincing as the somewhat dodgy poker player with a short fuse and Patinkin who keeps hot-headed Jack from digging himself into deeper trouble with Walsh’s creepily cheery jailer-of-sorts and his oafish son-in-law (Chris Penn),

Whilst it stands alone (or at least will for some), The Music Of Chance is sufficiently intriguingly opaque to make one want to seek out Auster’s novel.

FYI: Spader and Patinkin had appeared together in the 1991 film, True Colors.

 

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