Tiffany Haddish, a multi-award-winning comedian who stormed into the spotlight with her revelatory turn in “Girls Trip,” has taken on more serious roles before “The Card Counter.” Yet there was that inevitable narrative of the “funny person going dramatic” when it was announced that Paul Schrader had cast her alongside critical darlings Oscar Isaac and Willem Dafoe. Most of the reviews, even the more positive ones, don’t seem particularly enamored with Haddish’s performance, seeing her as lagging behind her more experienced co-stars as well as other comedic actors Schrader has directed to serious success, like Richard Pryor and Cedric the Entertainer. Negative write-ups assert that Haddish is an ill fit for the material, too warm a presence for a character seemingly written to be a classic femme in the vein of a Barbara Stanwyck or Gloria Grahame type. That, however, is the point, and it’s this oppositional quality that makes her turn so fascinating in “The Card Counter.”
The traditional femme fatale is a wily figure, a seductive dame with subterfuge on her mind and a willingness to do whatever it takes to get the thing she wants. She gets the best lines, the best costumes, and slinks through the shadows of noir. While there’s been decades of academic criticism on the femme fatale and how she represents contemporary anxieties surrounding women and sex, it’s hard to deny the allure, even when the portrayal veers into seriously problematic territory (consider how many of these women end up dead by the closing scene.)
La Linda is, on an aesthetic level, a classic femme fatale with an eye firmly on her genre predecessors: her wardrobe is stunning and evidently expensive, clearly the best-dressed woman in every dingy casino she enters, and she never has a hair out of place. Haddish can strut into every room like she can buy out the place without breaking a sweat. She’s expensive but not flashy, as much a player in the game as the sullen players in hoodies or the showboating divas of the poker championships.
Yet this is not a character of conniving force. La Linda’s objectives are relatively simple: find good card players for her roster, help them make a lot of money, and continue the cycle until she’s done with it. The characters with all the secrets are the men, from Isaac’s William Tell, a former Abu Ghraib torturer turned vagabond gambler, to Tye Sheridan’s Cirk, the troubled son of a former soldier who craves revenge above all else. Players put on personas, such as the hilariously brash Ukrainian champion who is forever accompanied by a cheer squad chanting, “USA! USA!” By comparison, La Linda is an open book, albeit one who keeps some key cards close to her chest.
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