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Film
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Shade
Shuffled almost imperceptibly into the garish deck of Hollywood new releases is this small gem of a film featuring Sylvester Stallone, Gabriel Byrne, Thandie Newton and Stuart Townsend.
Sunday, April 18, 2004
By Todd Gilchrist
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There’s always something thrilling about watching movie grifters at work, especially since there’s no way you can become the unfor~tunate bene~factor of their ruse. The sleight of hand, the confidence game, the inevitable duping of some poor shlub - all of it has a ring that’s so familiar, no matter what the stakes are, that the genre could probably perpetuate itself ad infinitum with but the slightest of tweaks.
Its foundations lie in such con-artist classics as The Sting, The Hustler and The Thomas Crown Affair (that’s the McQueen, not the Brosnan version), and continue to update themselves with perpetually cleverer subterfuge courtesy writers like Elmore Leonard and David Mamet; today, the double-crosses stack up so quickly that we scarcely have time to decipher who’s scamming who before the next twist pops around the corner. Shade, in the tradition of all good con movies, thinks bigger than its stake (in this case, a roster of acclaimed but hardly bankable actors), and almost successfully convinces the audience it can stand next to its big-money competition.
Stuart Townsend, pitifully underused since the 1997 indie hit Shooting Fish, plays Vernon, a card sharp whose fingers can magically find any card in the deck, and whose skill as a player are unrivaled by any but longtime legend The Dean (Sylvester Stallone). Catching up with his old partners Charlie (Gabriel Byrne) and Tiffany (Thandie Newton), Vernon conspires to overthrow The Dean’s reign and win a pot bigger than the three of them have ever bid for - a cool $2 million plus.
Scoring the stake money the best way they know how - by scamming a luckless mark named Larry (Jamie Foxx) - they soon discover that their target was apparently
mob-funded. As the stakes inadvertently rise, the group now has to not only trump their competition at the table, but also survive the match, pay back what they stole and then walk away winners.
Townsend is a much more gifted actor than most give him credit for; as the lesser half of a powerhouse coupling with now Oscar-gilded Charlize Theron, it’s easy to forget that good looks aren’t his only asset in an industry where they’re often the bottom line. Here, he loses his limey accent and lives in the role of Vernon, a guy young enough to still be cocky but not quite arrogant; he’s lost big time already, and in typical underdog form, he still has plenty to prove.
Byrne has played the grifting elder statesman more times than one can count (most memorably, of course, in The Usual Suspects), but he lends age and gravity to Charlie’s One Last Job plight. He, like Vernon, knows failure all too well, but remains youthful enough to enjoy the sport of the job for its own sake. Byrne gives us the weight of a lifetime on the make, lusting after that final, pie-in-the-sky score but realizing that he’s neither smart nor naturally talented enough to execute it by himself.
Newton’s Tiffany is, like so many of the characters she’s played, a femme fatale who can’t believe her own press, less tough than she seems but still unwilling to back down from any challenge she thinks her feminine wiles can conquer. Such a diminutive actress hardly seems like the right person for a seductive hustler like Tiffany, but it’s that vulnerability that makes her such a convincing addition to their team. She's the proverbial wolf in sheep's clothing, and knows how to play all sides against each other to get
what she wants.
Writer/ director Damien Nieman was once a card sharp and hustler himself at L.A.’s Magic Castle and appears to understand the intricacies of the con game better than any fledgling screenwriter since Christopher McQuarrie, or at least David Levien and Brian Koppelman (who wrote the near-perfect Rounders). His narrative isn’t so much dominated by a conventional three-act structure as it is by two main thrusts - getting the money and winning the Big Game.
But hardly does it matter when the proceedings shuffle along at such a brisk pace; only in the final moments of the film do the reverse and right angles even begin feel forced. The conclusion's fairly obvious, but somehow just 'left field' enough to dance gingerly on the line between plausibility and disbelief. Of course, by then, as a viewer, you've either been conned or you haven't.
Nieman gives the film a directorial polish that reaches towards the gloss of Vegas but stops short at a Reno-like level of modesty that keeps entertaining you long after the glamour of the big time has disappeared; count this film alongside such works as Paul Thomas Anderson’s Hard Eight, and consider how much greater the rewards are when you’ve stopped at a peak rather than in ambitious, overreaching decline.
Like a street corner shell game, Shade relies on little more than quick pacing and misdirection to win its hand, and does so with enough bravura to place its rank among the most entertaining of the year’s films thus far. With so many sucker bets winding their way around your wallet and coercing your hand before you’re really ready to make a safe cinematic wager, this will be one film you won’t mind losing your money to see.
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