Copyright Inverse
Lord Doyle (Colin Farrell) is a “gwai lo,” the Cantonese slang term for white foreigners that literally means “ghost man.” It’s a term that he’s embraced since he’s taken refuge in Macau, the gambling capital of the universe, and the perfect place to hide from his past mistakes. “Here, I barely exist,” Doyle says, “I’m invisible.” The Ballad Of A Small Player, Edward Berger’s flashy, frenetic follow-up to last year’s acclaimed papal drama Conclave, seems like the opposite of that Oscar-nominated film in every way. It’s hyper-stylized and sleazy and sordid, with Farrell’s go-for-broke performance embodying a movie that feels like its tenuous grip on reality could break at any moment and send it hurling into the ether. It’s a movie built on excesses — both visual and narrative — to match the decadent lifestyle that Doyle lives as a high-rolling gambler. But as Ballad Of A Small Player takes a surprising supernatural turn in its latter half, its brushes with spirituality make it a surprisingly fitting companion piece with Conclave, as well as a mildly entertaining watch that deserves better than being forgotten during awards season and heading to Netflix after only one week in the theaters. The Ballad Of A Small Player follows Lord Doyle, a gambling addict who just ran out of his last line of credit. Dogged at every turn by creditors and a private investigator (Tilda Swinton) who want him to pay back the millions that he owes, Doyle turns up at the one casino that hasn’t yet kicked him out. There he meets the mysterious and alluring Dao Ming (Fala Chen), who kindly offers him a new line of credit at the casino. But one tragic encounter with one of Dao’s clients leads the two of them down a cursed path from which there seems to be no escape. Farrell delivers one of his most over-the-top performances in years, imbuing his unrepentant lord with the kind of dirtbag charm that he displayed at the height of his It Boy days. Lord Doyle only wears bright, gaudy suits, orders the most expensive champagne, and plays with his lucky leather gloves straight from Savile Row, all to mask the fact that he’s not really a lord at all, but a criminal on the run after stealing millions from a wealthy old lady. He’s since gambled away his loot, but that doesn’t stop him from making a show for all the beleaguered Chinese employees who both pity him and hate him. But soon, Doyle’s excessive lifestyle catches up to him. And Farrell plays Doyle’s spiral into madness with a vicious fervor, looking increasingly sweaty and bleary-eyed, as if he’s an addict suffering from withdrawal. Yes, it’s a flashy performance, but it’s one that you kind of have to admire for how much Farrell throws himself into it. Berger matches Farrell’s performance in kind, displaying the kind of astonishing visual flourishes that made a subdued political drama like Conclave so entertaining to watch. But here it’s almost destabilizing, like Berger is throwing every directorial trick in the book at us — from overwhelmingly bright colors, to canted angles and extreme close-ups and everything in between. It’s exhausting, but it’s also intentional — this is a movie that feels like a descent into hell, something that Doyle actually articulates after Dao Ming tells him the story of the hell that greedy sinners find themselves in after their demise. “Is this hell?” he wonders, as he finds himself battling the exact kind of bottomless greed described in those Chinese myths. It’s here where Ballad Of A Small Player takes its supernatural turn, and where you start to wish that it embraced its ghost story even earlier. When taken as a cautionary tale about a man caught in a hell of his own making (and maybe even a literal hell), Ballad Of A Small Player is at its most interesting. It feels like one of the ancient Chinese folk tales that it constantly references, and makes it more of an interesting follow-up to Berger’s Conclave in how it interacts with spirituality and karma. But Ballad Of A Small Player is caught between the real world of gambling that it’s skewering, and the ghostly tale that it becomes. One wishes that the script by Rowan Joffé could more elegantly consolidate the two. Thankfully, Farrell’s risky gamble of a performance, and Berger’s hyper-stylized direction, saves Ballad Of A Small Player from becoming too pitchy and uneven. It’s messy and not as coherent as Conclave, but it shows that Berger is still a director to watch. The Ballad Of A Small Player is streaming on Netflix now.
