The Cooler was one of those little movies that came out last fall/winter and only stuck around in theaters for about a week or so, which means I had to wait around until last week when it was released on DVD. For being so close to L.A., you'd think Santa Barbara would offer a little more respect towards the smaller stuff, but sometimes it feels further away than when I was living in the Bay Area. The point is, The Cooler is a worthy little film that barely anyone saw and deserved at least some of the ticket sales that were wasted on second or third viewings of The Return of the King.

William H. Macy plays another loser as the title character, known as a cooler because he has such incredibly bad luck when it comes to gambling that he's actually employed by a Las Vegas casino to "cool" a table when it's hot. Get it? Yeah, so it's a little far-fetched at face value, but if you think about casinos these days doing everything in their power to skew the odds, I would only be half surprised if this was closer to reality than we all suspect.

Macy is good as always and so is Maria Bello as a cocktail waitress who falls in love with him, but the real star is Alec Baldwin - who if you remember received a very deserving Oscar nomination. His character, Sonny, runs the casino and employs said cooler, and is such a believer in both his employee's abilities and old-school Vegas that he allows his emotions to get out of hand. Basically, he's a gangster who hates seeing LV get transformed into a family place and can't face up to the fact that both he and his ways are a thing of the past. There's a great conversation early in the film about how disgraceful it is for the lead lion of a pack to be surpassed by a younger, up-and-coming lion, which in my eyes was meant to represent more than just Baldwin's character but also the entire city.

What I enjoyed most about The Cooler, in addition to a few good twists, is how Baldwin's character is really the biggest gambling addict of them all, albeit from the nicely slanted odds of being the house. The film also shows us how luck can often run full circle and whether or not it's good or bad often depends on your perspective.

Posted May 16, 2004 | link