The Cooler

Wayne Kramer's first feature The Cooler starts from a terrific comic-ironic premise: Bernie Lootz (William H. Macy) radiates defeat so penetratingly he works at a Vegas casino spreading it around. Management keeps an eye on the floor and dispatches him to tables where people are winning and sure enough winners become losers. He can do it by playing blackjack next to a guy on a streak but sometimes just speaking to a player is enough. There's nothing underhanded about it; he cools people's luck just by being himself.

Bernie is the quintessential ironic protagonist, the luckless man. Macy, whose face here looks like a partially-deflated smiley-faced balloon, is perhaps too apt for the role, because you sense the moviemakers' problem: Bernie's character and situation are so allegorically perfect you hate to see them altered by a plot. The script by Kramer and Frank Hannah does have one expert further move. When Shelly (Alec Baldwin), the old-style, pre-corporate thug who runs the joint sends a girl to Bernie's room to keep him "happy," they fall in love. We thought Bernie's life was screwed into the bottom of the barrel but in fact there is one more turn: when he's happy he doesn't spoil gamblers' luck he increases it, which of course ends his own brief run. Since Shelly gave him the job to pay off a gambling debt (after smashing his kneecap), Bernie's happiness brings the roof down on his head. He's happy, but he's a dead man.

Sticking to these terms, The Cooler would make a wonderful short. It gets at how we identify with ironic protagonists who represent how our lives can feel more ill-fated than mere chance could make them. We don't feel unlucky, we feel cursed--the dice aren't rigged, they want to come up snake eyes, they're enjoying our misery.

But the movie doesn't stick to these terms, and once Bernie and Natalie (Maria Bello), the young woman sent in to him, have fallen in love, it flickers in and out of irony. Natalie is a hard-luck customer, too. A former midwestern beauty queen, she's now a failed Vegas showgirl and a flailing cocktail waitress in the casino. Bernie is a sad-sack shmuck but he's also the best thing that's happened to Natalie in ages, maybe ever. It's precisely his earnestness and ineffectual gallantry--part of what makes him a loser in Shelly's eyes--that she responds to. In narrative terms this means Bernie becomes Natalie's knight, and though he's an unlikely knight, once this has happened the movie becomes a romance in which Bernie has to defeat Shelly the dark knight in order to rescue his damsel.

At the same time, Natalie's role has been written in yet another vein, realism. Natalie is given theatrical exposition of her background, but far from stopping the movie Bello's readings in these scenes single-handedly make it seem as if it's about real people. You may be disappointed as you feel the irony fading, as the movie gets warmer not cooler, but Bello's detailed performance is the most riveting element.