★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - A black and blue semi-trailer truck passes by a coffee shop whose exterior lights are askew, and a man in a dark overcoat waits for the truck to pass, pauses for a moment more, then crosses the road towards coffee. Outside the diner a young man sits on the ground, bedraggled and bestubbled, knees up, arms crossed and looking despondent...
(4/4)
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson | Producers: Robert Jones, John Lyons | Writer: Paul Thomas Anderson | Starring: Philip Baker Hall, John C. Reilly, Gwyneth Paltrow, Samuel L. Jackson, Philip Seymour Hoffman | Music: Jon Brion, Michael Penn | Cinematography: Robert Elswit | Editor: Barbara Tulliver
A black and blue semi-trailer truck passes by a coffee shop whose exterior lights are askew, and a man in a dark overcoat waits for the truck to pass, pauses for a moment more, then crosses the road towards coffee. Outside the diner a young man sits on the ground, bedraggled and bestubbled, knees up, arms crossed and looking despondent. With a gruff voice and sharp diction, the older man invites the younger inside for a drink and a cigarette. We get our first look at his face, weathered but well put together, neat and somewhere in his late fifties or early sixties. After learning that the young man is struggling for the $6,000 it will take to bury his mother, the older man, Sydney (Philip Baker Hall), proposes that John (John C. Reilly) accompany him to Las Vegas.
Two years later, his bills paid but still waifish when it comes to gambling, John continues to defer to Sydney in matters of etiquette and follows him to the same casinos and other haunts, but he is starting to test his independence, to find new friends and manners. They’re based in Reno, and Sydney takes on another stray in the form of Clementine (Gwyneth Paltrow), a cocktail waitress, an ingénue or something harder. Is Sydney helping these two out of the kindness of his heart? Perhaps we get a clue when he reveals to Clementine that he has children who he has not spoken to in years, an adult son and a slightly older daughter: perhaps Sydney is looking for a surrogate family, but a clue is all we can muster. Sydney brings John and Clementine together. But out of his hands, things go awry, and when John and Clementine opt to take one of her other ‘Johns’ hostage over an unpaid $300, the trio must scramble to beat the threats of police, prison, and blackmail.
Hard Eight, a neo-noir crime drama, was the first feature directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, who had to wrest back control of the final cut using the impending success of Boogie Nights as leverage. Originally titled ‘Sydney’, it expanded on the acclaimed short Cigarettes & Coffee, which also stars Philip Baker Hall, and set in a diner, sees various couples unfold the tumultuous journey of a twenty-dollar note with a name scrawled upon it.
In contrast to the earlier short, Hard Eight remains elliptical in terms of plot, but less laden and more natural when it comes to dialogue. It stands as a taut and enveloping character study, a hard-edged yet rhythmic mood piece, an ostensible thriller in which for half of its run-time, everything goes more or less swimmingly, the only tension emanating from Sydney’s steely self-possession and the lingering lack of tension. It focuses intently on its four characters, Sydney, John, Clementine, and Jimmy (Samuel L. Jackson), a gambling friend of John’s who seems amiable enough but thinks he can pierce the cool old-school ambiance, with a star turn at the midpoint from Philip Seymour Hoffman as a brash young craps player, who provides a spark of energy which functions as both portent and climax.
Philip Baker Hall as Sydney is captivating for so much of the film precisely for his mixture of forthrightness and inscrutability, which gives way so seamlessly later on to displays of genuine fear and openhearted emotion. We are surprised when, after John and Clementine take their leave and he disposes of some crucial pieces of evidence, the first thing that he does is watch their wedding video, but it is an expansion rather than a modification of character, his mode of steady contemplation shown as a way of processing great depths of feeling more than a necessity for cold calculation. We are used, too, to Sydney providing the film with its kinetic energy: he tells people what to do and where to go, and the camera follows him, but suddenly we face him as he sits, each of us waiting, and we find that his hardness matches his capacity for sentiment.
