The existentialist desire to be self-created and therefore master of one’s fate informs Croupier (1997), the fruit of Mike Hodges’ collaboration with screenwriter Paul Mayersberg who had developed the script over a number of years.
Mayersberg was strongly influenced by European existentialist noir, notably Robert Bresson and Jean-Pierre Melville with their sense of a contingent universe in which actions are random and inexplicable. It also draws on American noir, especially Double Indemnity (1944) and Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place (1950). The name of its heroine Marion is taken from Hitchcock’s Psycho, while its anti-hero, Jack Manfred, alludes to Byron’s Count Manfred, one of the central figures in English Gothic literature. This rich cultural heritage is molded into a highly contemporary tale that focuses on would-be writer, Jack (Clive Owen), searching for his subject and his fictional hero, and through them his true identity. Everything changes when, at the behest of his gambler father, Jack resumes his old profession of croupier, returning to a subterranean noir world of tawdry glamour, shimmering surfaces and distorting reflections, a world obsessed with money and chance: gambling has often been a handy metaphor for an existentialist view of life. In creating the casino where much of the action takes place, production designer Jon Bunker commented: ‘Mike [Hodges] wanted to convey a sense of purgatory so we made the walls out of mirrors, which gives a
sense of the casino extending forever. It also has the effect that when Jack enters the casino, the reflection of the mirror conveys the idea of him walking away from himself.’ This separation of character and consciousness is reinforced by Croupier’s unconventional use of voice-over. Jack’s voice-over is neither confessional nor a device to expound the plot, but a detached, third person commentary on his actions. Owen was asked to learn the voice-over so that he played the scenes as if he was responding to his own thoughts. Its mode is speculative, allowing Jack to invoke the great existential questions: What matters? What life’s about? Who am I? As Mayersberg remarked, its effect is to efface characterization altogether making Croupier the story of a nobody, but one who is also Everyman.As Jack rediscovers the fascination of being a croupier, cool, professional, detached and in control, he gradually transmutes into his Doppelgänger Jake – symbolised as he redyes his bleached blond hair to its natural black – who understands that the object of life is to ‘fuck the
world over’. Jake is the ideal protagonist for Jack’s novel I, Croupier, which becomes a number 1 bestseller in a world fascinated by ruthless greed. For Hodges, Jake is a contemporary figure, the product of a post-Thatcherite world of casualised labour where everyone is on his own, struggling to succeed and caught up in forces they cannot control. It is Jake who is prepared to collude in the scheme of femme fatale Jani (Alex Kingston) to rob the casino, and when his girlfriend Marion (Gina McKee) – who wants him to remain the blond nice guy, to remain her romanticized image of the struggling author – is killed by a hit and run driver, a random act whose meaning is unclear, Jack’s conscience dies with her. Stripped of illusions, Jake settles down with worldly fellow croupier and ex-prostitute Bella (Kate Hardie), who accepts him as he is, his ruthlessness, violence and self-centredness. Thinking he is now in control of his life, Jake dedicates himself to his self-created wholeness unlike the sad gamblers who play at his table, but in a final irony, he learns that Jani was his father’s mistress and he was therefore a mere pawn in his father’s clever game.This article continues here
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