Owning Mahowny

Canadian movies- especially those made with taxpayers' dollars- have always bored me. But "Owning Mahowny" broke the mold, and is a mesmerizing exception to the rule. I am amazed this film did not meet with more popular success, given the critical acclaim it received.

Philip Seymour Hoffman's portrayal of the bland and somewhat shabby banker who embezzled 10 million to support his gambling addiction is spot on. I can say this with some authority since I knew "Mahowny" personally back in high school, where his predilection for the racetrack and for fleecing junior students at cards was legendary. The seedy clothes, the clunker car, and the repressed demeanor all ring true. Kudos to Hoffman for a riveting performance.

Gambling movies (The Cincinnati Kid, The Hustler) have by and large ignored the addiction angle. This film delivers- in spades.

This is a pretty safe and unremarkable project in many regards. The story is appealing as a sort of funny anti-hero, a resourceful guy with an uncontrolled urge to gamble. He steals so he can feed is habit, and everybody around him has money-related interests except himself. It's made more interesting to follow because it's based on a real story, and apparently it follows it quite closely.

Technically it's as good as most of Hollywood makes, competent in every aspect except direction, which is flat and dead. No defined camera stance, merely the basic representation of what's happening.

But nothing of that matters because who the camera frames almost always is the late Seymour Hoffman. And that is more than enough. Every movement counts, every restrained facial sign shows something. He was really a method student, but i suspect he didn't have to search very deep to get to his characters. His most remarkable characters all live in their own world, tormented by uncontrolled urges, in pain by maladjustment to an unforgiving unfit world. His pain was real in every character of his, he just channeled it each time to a different character, to a different world, to a different misfit quirky corner of the world.

It's an extra pain to watch each one of his movies now, when we know we won't see anything new from him ever again, and we understand that not so much of what he showed us was acting, faking on a stage, but instead was the masking of a real pain. Or it could be the other way around. It could be that, in a tragic sense, the high standard that Hoffman proposed for his own craft drained and exhausted the real man so much that he was left in the limbo between his full creations and the emptiness of the somehow unfulfilled real life, whatever that might be.

It's not difficult to watch this film now, and map the gambling urge of Mahowny to the addictions of Hoffman in the real life, and understand that the "just a few more minutes" could in fact be the few more minutes he always requested from himself.

watch this, the film won't change you, but Philip S. Hoffman will.

`Some folks believe that everyone has a public life, a private life and a secret life.'

These are the opening words of `Owning Mahowny,' a fascinating real-life tale of a compulsive gambler whose life falls to pieces when he begins embezzling funds from the bank where he works in order to feed his obsession. Dan Mahowny's `secret life' became public in the early 1980's when he was finally arrested and convicted on charges of bank theft. Philip Seymour Hoffman, who has made a career out of playing sad sack, tormented souls, gives one of his richest performances to date as Mahowny, a mild-mannered man caught in the grip of that compulsive sickness known as gambling addiction. Minnie Driver plays his devoted girlfriend who loves Dan dearly but who cannot bear to stand by and watch helplessly as he slowly but inexorably destroys his life.

If the film were only about Mahowny's gambling problem, it would be no different from countless TV movies made on the same subject. What sets this film apart is the way in which writer Maurice Chauvet (working off the original novel by Gary Stephen Ross) and director Richard Kwietniowski make the background of the story as compelling as the foreground. The astute, observant script focuses as much on the ins and outs of the casino and gambling worlds as it does on the personal travails of its main character. Particularly intriguing is the way in which high rollers are followed and coddled by the casino owners using both high tech equipment like cameras and monitors as well as plain old-fashioned flattery, obsequiousness and deceit. John Hurt, in a brilliant performance, plays a smarmy casino operator in Atlantic City who will stop at nothing to make Mahowny feel at home in his establishment – all for the purpose of having his new found `friend' gamble away a fortune at his tables, of course. The film is, in fact, filled with interesting side characters, including a sympathetic bellhop, who befriends Dan and who tries to convince him to leave the casino he happens to work for; several of the petty loan sharks with whom Dan finds himself inextricably connected; and a whole host of law enforcement officials whose job it is to bring Dan in on grand theft felony charges.

The filmmakers have taken a laid back, subtle approach to their material. They allow the story to develop slowly, offering us the chance to get to know Mahowny and his world at an unhurried, leisurely pace. Since Mahowny is, himself, such a secretive, quiet character, it is appropriate that the film that bears his name should also reflect that quality of muted sadness in its pacing and tone. Towards the end, however, once the authorities begin moving in for the kill and we sense the inevitable grip of Fate tightening around this strangely likable character, the film becomes both highly suspenseful and immensely moving at one and the same time. What's fascinating is that we are always one step ahead of Mahowny in our understanding of what is about to befall him. As in all great tragedies, it is the Cassandra-like burden placed on the audience – that of being able to see the future with no hope of doing anything to prevent it – that gives the film its air of pervasive sadness.

`Owning Mahowny' is a beautifully written, directed and acted film that opens up for us a strange and fascinating world.

"Owning Mahoney" tells of a bank account manager and pathological gambler who lives from one wager to the next on a collision course with oblivion. A powerful and compelling tour de force by Hoffman - who once again proves he ranks among the actor's actors with the likes of Brando, Pacino, and Nicholson - this engrossing film claims to be a true story of a man, money, and an obsession of remarkable proportions. A worthwhile watch for Hoffman fans and anyone into character studies, particularly of obsessive-compulsive types. All others stay away. (A-)

I'm not sure that it was a fantastic movie, but it really sticks with me. I gamble quite a bit too, and I regularly see Mahoney-like behaviours at the casino. The guy next to me the other day started with $200, then went up, in my eyes undeservingly, to about $2500, and finally lost it all in a matter of half an hour. The entire time completely without expression, like a gambler, like Mahoney. No matter what happens to a gambler in the short term, he knows that it is ephemeral. Unfortunately, the ephemeral losses are a bit bigger than the ephemeral wins, and the cumulative loss is what you are stuck with in the end.

I liked the way that Mahoney was so boring. As though the things that make life interesting for the average person and the things that make the average person interesting all pale in his eyes to the passionate communion that he has with the game.