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| Weekend |
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By Dena Hill
Contributing Writer |
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Lady Luck picks a slick love
story with an edge
 |
| Lovers Natalie (Maria Bello) and Bernie
(William H. Macy) are separated by Shelly (Alec
Baldwin), whose uses Bernie’s bad luck against
his casino clientele in The
Cooler. | “Do
you know what I do at the Shangri-La?” Bernie
Lootz, a mythical loser, asks the casino
cocktail waitress who soon becomes his unlikely
girlfriend.
“You’re a cooler. You turn
winners into losers,” she says. Indeed he
does.
Set in an old casino in Las Vegas,
The Cooler stars William H. Macy as the
ironically named “Lootz” and Alec Baldwin as the
Shangri-La’s seething director of operations,
Shelly Kaplow.
As the “cooler,” Bernie
moves from table to table — wherever anyone is
winning — and his mere presence turns anyone’s
good luck into instant misery. His mournful
control over fortune is so reliable that Shelly
employs him to cool Lady Fortune’s ardor for the
casino’s patrons, and in doing so to pay off a
long-time gambling debt to Shelly.
Bernie walks with a limp as a result of
a broken knee from Shelly’s payment plan. When
we first meet him, he’s down to his last week of
work after many years at the casino. He is
living in a rundown motel and counting the days
until he’s free to move on.
But Shelly
has his own ideas about Bernie’s future. He
doesn’t want to lose Bernie’s moneymaking
ability at the casino. The Shangri-La — a
remnant of the ‘60s heyday of Las Vegas — is
Shelly’s life, and he’s being pressured by an
up-and-coming casino manager (Ron Livingston) to
update the aging venue. Bernie is (it’s hard to
avoid the clichés) his ace in the
hole.
But then Bernie falls in love with
the cocktail waitress, Natalie Belisario (Maria
Bello), and, astonishingly, she returns his
affections. Lady Luck actually likes him? When
his luck begins to change, it’s great for him,
but not such a sweet deal for Shelly, who’s
playing for his own high stakes.
But the
romance between Lootz and Natalie absorbs us.
Their first love scene is painful to watch and
moving at the same time — and just so we don’t
miss the point, they fumble at each other to the
sound of “Luck be a Lady Tonight.”
Mr.
Macy, a powerhouse at sad sack roles, clearly
understands the nuances of whimsy needed to
switch Bernie’s personality from grim to
glowing, and he delivers it all without showing
the wheels in movement. To his credit, director
and co-screenwriter Wayne Kramer doesn’t lose a
moment of the humanity played out on Mr. Macy’s
face as Bernie quickly falls in love with the
girl he thought he could never have.
As
the star-crossed lovers (sorry), Mr. Macy and
Ms. Bello go from sexy, to gut-bustingly funny,
to heart-breaking and then some. Ms. Bello
neither lapses into overkill as the world-weary
Natalie, nor fails to generate vulnerability
when Natalie truly lets down her guard. As Lady
Fortune, she’s a powerful force.
But no
matter how good Mr. Macy and Ms. Bello are, Alec
Baldwin simply steals every scene he is in. In
the best performance of his life, Mr. Baldwin
builds a character so complex that every scene
reveals a little more to gawk at. Mr. Baldwin’s
characterization of Shelly is so good that we
can almost see him as a little boy at a Las
Vegas pool, gladly running to fetch cigarettes
and martinis for the Rat Pack, hoping to grow up
to look just like them.
He smokes, wears
the garnet ring and the shiny ties, and tells
raunchy stories for the guys. But underneath it
all, he’s downright scary.
Still, no
matter how rotten and violent Shelly shows he
is, Mr. Baldwin makes his internal desperation
empathetic. When he smashes the hated scale
model of the proposed “Disneyfied” casino
(complete with entertainment center and roller
coaster) and then smashes the smarmy young
corporate executive (Livingston) who brought it,
we can all feel, if only for a moment, a twinge
of his longing for the old days, when guys had
class — and dressed
better. |
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