Bigger Deal

[WARNING: The penultimate paragraph has a Sopranos spoiler]

It’s the final table of the "main event" of the World Series of Poker. For the first time in poker history, the three remaining players include a father and son. Junior, we already know, is holding pocket rockets. So the hand is his when Dad, already a two-time world champ, sets himself in with pocket kings. We’ve seen the board, which has helped neither of them. Son stares down Dad for a cruelly long time, in the circs, then … fasten your seat belts … mucks his cards.

WHAT? Yes, Junior mucks. It’s all to do with an emotional scene in the men’s room during the last break, when dad has told son that mum forgave him on her deathbed for treating them both like shit. Or words to that effect. Her wedding ring, you see, has passed back and forth between them (via sundry pawn shops) like some sort of lucky talisman. No, I don’t really get it, either. But if any of my three sons played like that against me at the final table of the World Series, I’d (a) be thrilled to bits, then (b) trouser the prize money before giving him a sound ticking-off for being so bloody patronizing.

Robert Duvall, by contrast, sits Eric Bana down for a nickel-and-dime game – just like in the childhood kitchen, aaaah – and proceeds to lose back a few bucks. Yes, this is the climactic scene of the new poker movie Lucky You – all two long hours of which I saw in New York last week on my one afternoon off from plugging Bigger Deal.

I know, I should have spent those rare few leisure-hours at The Lives of Others. Or so my youngest son Ben (who works in L.A. in the movies, so he should know) told me over dinner at my favourite Manhattan restaurant, Les Halles, with his wonderful wife Salome. ‘But, son,’ I didn’t say (well, I’m not – quite – American), ‘I just had to catch Lucky You before it disappeared without trace.’

Which it well might – and you won’t have missed a thing (which is why I don’t feel at all bad about giving away the ending). Almost a year after it was hyped with due Tinseltown vulgarity at last year’s World Series in Vegas, the movie has finally snuk out amid trade rumours of rewrites, reshoots, turnaround, development hell, all the rest of it. It was lucky, I am told, to get a distributor at all, rather than going straight to video. And it’s really not hard to see why.

Director and co-writer Curtis Hanson (‘LA Confidential’, ‘Wonder Boys’, ‘8 Mile’) has concentrated so much on poker authenticity that he seems to have overlooked the love affair between Bana and the grotesquely miscast Drew Barrymore supposedly at the heart of the plot. Not for a moment do we believe that suave, laid-back Bana’s Huck Cheever has finally found The One For Him (even though he’s a bit of a rover) in clunky, simpering Barrymore’s torch-singing Billie Offer. The main relationship in the film is, of course, that between Bana’s Huck and his dad, veteran poker pro L. C. Cheever, persuasively played by Duvall despite the most absurd rug in movie history.

It’s all set at the 2003 WSOP, won in the movie by a fictional clone of online qualifier Chris Moneymaker, the aptly-named Tennessee accountant whose victory that year played such a symbolic role in the current poker boom. So it’s still at Binion’s Horseshoe – expensively reconstructed for the movie on a Hollywood sound stage, as is the swanky card-room of the Bellagio. There are cameo appearances as Themselves from poker pros including Doyle Brunson and Phil Hellmuth, Daniel Negreanu and Barry Greenstein, Johnny Chan and Marsha Waggoner. Sam Farha even gets a couple of lines, which he delivers leadenly. Only Jennifer Harman can muster the acting skills to play a character called something other than Jennifer Harman. And veteran Hollywood actress Jean Smart puts them all to shame with a terrific cameo as Michelle Carson, the only woman to reach the final table – at which her all-in King flush is beaten by Duvall’s, er, straight flush.

Oh no, I hear you say. Can the poker scenes be as bad as that absurd confrontation between Steve McQueen and Edward G Robinson at the end of the otherwise wonderful The Cincinnati Kid ? In Big Deal, as I’m sure you recall, I point out that if you played five-card stud 24 hours a day, 5 days a week, 365 days a year, those two hands – a full house beaten by a straight flush – would coincide about once every 443 years. Even then, one player would surely figure the other was cheating, and sort matters out with a bullet or three.

No, the poker scenes in Lucky You – lousy title, by the way, especially when we’re all trying to demonstrate to the authorities that poker is primarily a skill game – are not as bad as that. They’re moody, they look authentic, they focus (like edited TV coverage of poker tournaments) on the gravity-shift hands rather than the hours and hours of leather-ass play it takes to get there. But they wholly fail to convince us of the film’s apparent message, spoken by father to son: "You got it backwards kid. You play cards the way you should lead your life. And you lead your life the way you should play cards…"

Whoa. That’s the only way Hollywood can think of to tackle poker – to make it a metaphor for life, then make life itself less than convincing. I have my doubts that Lucky You will make it to a cinema near you in the near future, or even come available on DVD. It will probably just quietly disappear, as if it had never existed, like the untrackable-down Stuey, that Ungar biopic starring Michael Imperioli, [WARNING : THE SOPRANOS SPOILER] a.k.a the late (whoops, sorry, I saw that, too, months before it will reach the UK) ‘Christopher’ from The Sopranos.

Don’t worry – like I say, you haven’t missed a thing. If I were you, I’d stick to your (and my) annual viewing of the great Chan-Sidel scene in Rounders.