In his new film “21”, Kevin Spacey plays, Mickey, a professor of mathematics at the Massachussets Institute of Technology. When Ben, a new student, shows an exceptional talent for statistics, Mickey invites him to join a secret team of professional card-players, recruited from his fellow-students. The team goes to Las Vegas every weekend and wins tens of thousands of dollars “card counting”. Ben needs $300,000 to pay for his college fees, and after some hesitation he joins the team.
From the naieve nerdiness of student life at MIT, Ben rapidly isuccumbs to the high-octane world of Las Vegas: vast hotel suites, private pools, stretch limos, glamorous women, limitless shopping. Of course, after riding high and beating the Casino´s security systems for some months, the team rapidly falls apart and the whole scheme unravels with very nasty consequences.
The story is very loosely based on the experiences pf several groups of MITstudents and graduates who actually used their collective statistical abilities to win a lot of money over a period of about twenty years from the late 1970s onwards.
Properly handled, the true story could have made a fascinating film. But “21” is a glib and depressing experience. True, it gave Spacey the chance to do his charming - but vicious – reptile act, but not one of the characters had an ounce of true weight or humanity. Whatever moral sense they might have had was swept away by the possibility of satisfying their greed and selfishness. At the same time, the sheer sensory assault of the Las Vegas settings reduced much of the film to a sort of hellishly over-blown travelogue. For a European, the passion for making money at all costs, fuelled in this case, by the gross commercialism of the American Educational system, is sad at first, but ultimately sickening. That might have been the effect that the producers – and Spacey – wished to create but if it was they went about it in a very strange way.
By one of those flukes that tell us a great deal about the value-gulf between European sensibilities and mainstream USA, the BBC brought together four members of the team that had made the cult classic “Withnail and I” in 1986. Here again we have intensely unhappy and penniless young men and a rich older man who attempts to seduce one of them at his house in the country. But of course, this film is a comedy in which the characters are doomed to fail rather tragically. However, W &I is a comedy. The misery of their predicament, the waste of their talents and the stupidity of their behaviour (endless drink, even a swig of lighter-fluid, lack of basic hygiene,cigarettes, drugs, sexual misadventures, boorishness and incompetence ) is played with absolute and at times heartrending seriousness, and is, of course, wincingly alarming and wickedly funny.
It would be interesting to see what Bruce Robinson, the author of the semi-autobiographical W & I , would have done with the original plot and characters that became “21”. With his eye for the absurdity of excess, and his talent for the tragi-comic, I guarantee that it would have been a damn site better film – and a lot more fun. One of the great “If-Only”s perhaps.
