Owning Mahowny | Review

Philip Seymour Hoffman brings his talents to the ‘craps’ table.

Richard Kwietniowski’s newest indie film since Love and Death on Long Island showcases the brilliant acting talent of a man, who in most film casting circles would be considered the 90’s poster-child for the go to guy for supporting role performances. Unlike the sub-par solo gas-inhaling role in Love Liza, Philip Seymour Hoffman delivers the type of performance that breaks the bank.

Based on the true Torontonian early 80’s story of one man who defrauded a bank, Owning Mahowny gives us a protagonist with a certain caped-crusader type of personality, as he is a bank manager by day and a compulsive gambler by night, actually he is a man thinking of the odds, of the math and of how to make withdrawals without being caught at almost every blinking second of his life. As the rules of gambling and life have it, lady luck is not a permanent state of being for anyone. This winning combination of a person is beautifully portrayed by Hoffman who plays a shabby character who walks around in out-dated clothes and drives around in a gas-guzzling old car, while his plain Jane girlfriend with a god awful wig played by Minnie Driver (Big Night) wonders if her boyfriend will ever leave the horse-track. For the man who admits to not have a gambling problem, but a financial one, the stakes only get higher and the two houses of money-the bank and the casino act as safe-havens between his withdrawal symptoms. Under the watchful eye of the video-cameras, actor John Hurt acts as the Atlantic City casino manager whose voice alone shows the poisonous face of greed and what we have is a predictable tale displaying the cycle of cruelty where the roll of the dice or the flip of a card decides the fate of a man of different names such as the iceman, the ribs without the sauce and a coke guy or simply the guy who owes plenty of money.

Kwietniowski shows us an aspect of the gambler that we rarely witness in films, usually those who rob the bank or bust the banks of Vegas come off as winners in the end, here we are offered up a psychological examination of the high stakes world which turns out more losers than winners. Owning Mahowny parallels the raising the stakes cycle that sees the protagonist go from loan shark to gambling to winning and then losing almost everything including what means the most to him as in his job and potentially his girlfriend and the film also becomes an account of who controls him, the addiction, the casino, the money, the bookies or perhaps in the end his girlfriend. What is interesting is how Hoffman character’s ruthlessness antics of betting without a definite strategy conflicts with the notion of the typical gambler, of course what is uncommon is how he stole over 10-million in his cash withdrawals and perhaps what we end up liking about the character was that he stole from the two places that take so much away from the public, hence I could understand the type of reaction that this news story got back then. Although it appears to be an easy cut and paste job, intriguing story and a fascinating character, Kwietniowski also provides us some deeper layers if you look hard enough away from the obvious mess of the plus/minus world. In a deep grey, grotesque Toronto over-cloud, the high-stakes drama is loaded in a metaphoric language in which the visuals and the dialogue convey how this disease fuels more than a bad habit, but controls the man’s every train of thought with the poignant metaphors of the Niagara falls and the car that runs out of gas matched with some spiraling point-of-view shots to describe his state of mind.

Half the year has past and Owning Mahowny finds itself at the top of my list, Kwietniowski manages to make a great picture out of meager resources, in part thanks to the talents of one actor who excels to the point that I would label his portrayal as the early-Oscar favorite for the simple reason that he manages to depict a character with a deep range of emotions found in an individual who had very little of it. Now let’s just hope that Kwietniowski doesn’t make us wait another five years until his next feature.

Rating 4 stars