Hard Eight

An older man for reasons known only to him takes a young man who is on his last leg under his wing. 

He shows him how to live the life of a gambler. It is not, let’s say, very romantic. But the old man (Philip Baker Hall) has a certain style and gravity and presence that’s lacking in young men everywhere. 

A cocktail waitress calls him Captain. That name is a lot closer to the truth than his given sobriquet of Sydney. 

We see the young man, (John C Reilly) respects this new mentor and begins to emulate him. 

And then, well, life can take some turns man. 

Hard Eight was written and directed by then first time director Paul Thomas Anderson in 1996. It really doesn’t suggest what Anderson’s movies would become.

The deep pain and longing and need for connection is there, certainly. But they are wrapped in low rent and low budget sort of crime film. 

I wonder if he could have gotten the budget if the setting would have been more glamorous. I doubt it because none of these players are meant to be high rollers.  

I watched Hard Eight years ago and watched it again tonight as I psych myself up and get ready for One Battle After Another. 

IMDB claims that Anderson doesn’t talk about this movie all that often except to say that he didn’t understand back then how he needed to make the relationships between a director and his producer work to get what he wanted. 

The movie was allegedly taken from him and the producer was going to cut it shorter. But Anderson won out when the flick got accepted into Cannes. 

From the outside and knowing what we know now it’s hard to argue that anyone but Anderson should have the Final Cut on his movies. But consider that Anderson really wanted to call this flick “Sydney.” 

That’s maybe the correct name for this film while also being a terrible name for a movie you want people to pay money to see. 

This is probably the definition of a slow burn or maybe the first half of it is just required to be slow. The second half picks up nicely and features several violent crimes and at least one or two all timer “tough guy” lines. 

But don’t misunderstand because this is not what I would call a tough guy flick. Even back at the beginning Anderson would never let a character be anything other than a rounded human being. That rules out most of the archetypes required to make a revenge picture or a crime picture actually work. 

What we end up with is unique people placed in a few extraordinary circumstances. 

A crime picture that doubles as a character study. 

It works. I liked it. But I’m also very glad that Anderson found his groove on his next go round.