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	GIFFONE

Don’t Bet Too Low, Don’t Fold Too Soon
a review of Turn the River
by Susan Giffone [media reviewer/critic] 5/6/08

A nineteen-year-old Catholic seminarian falls for a twenty-five-year-old female card shark/pool hustler, impregnates her, and marries her.  The seminarian’s mother digs up the pool hustler’s deep, dark past and uses it to convince her to divorce the seminarian, and give up the baby.  Twelve years later, mama/shark/hustler wants her baby back, and she makes plans to do so using the only means at her disposal: playing high-stakes pool.

Compelling films have been constructed on flimsier premises.

Writer and director Chris Eigeman follows his plot outline faithfully to its logical conclusion in Turn the River (rated R for language).  Hard-living Kailey (Famke Janssen) plays poker and pool, smokes drinks, sleeps on pool tables -- and never once eats anything.  Her son, twelve-year-old Gulley (newcomer Jaymie Dornan), meanwhile, divides his time between a stiff and confining Catholic school and his toxic father, David (Matt Ross).  Kailey begins a clandestine correspondence with Gulley with the help of her mentor Quinn (played by a gruff, but loveable, Rip Torn).  Kailey meets Gulley in the park before school every few weeks, exchanges letters with him through Quinn, plays games of pool, and socks away her winnings in the back of her truck.

The movie’s real bad guy is, of course, David’s mother Abigail: Catholic mom from hell (played with suitable loathsomeness by Lois Smith).  Juxtaposed with scenes of Kailey’s gritty crowd of gamblers and toughs, we see Abigail cross-examining David about his church attendance and Gulley about his catechism, reminding them both sternly that “eternity is a hell of a long time.”  It is she who originally deprived Kailey of her son, and who, presumably, also poisoned David, whose bitterness and anger periodically boil over and burn Gulley, who hasn’t had the hope bludgeoned out of him. Yet. 

Eigeman shows us these two worlds which both have a claim on Gulley, as if to ask which environment is the healthier one in which to raise a child.  And we increasingly share Kailey’s sense of urgency as we realize that it’s only a matter of time before Gulley is crushed under the combined weight of his grandmother’s hypocritical religion and his father’s veiled abuse.

Eigeman is at his best when he focuses on the characters.  The strongest scenes are not those in which Kailey coolly goes up against stronger pool players, but the ones in which she checks up on Gulley, asking him casually about home and school, glancing about surreptitiously to see if they’re being watched.  Eigeman’s pool hall close-ups play down Janssen’s beauty, and concentrate instead on her intensely focused eyes.  Jaymie Dornan depicts Gulley without artifice as a haunted child, who only lets down his guard when he is with his mother.  Matt Ross portrays David with just enough nastiness to make viewers alternately hate him and feel sorry for him.  Lois Smith plays against type as Abigail, the religious killjoy everybody loves to hate. 

Eigeman exercises admirable restraint, preferring to show us, rather than tell us, what the characters are like.  Kailey nervously chews the side of her thumb.  She writes notes to Gulley on simple sheets of lined notepaper; Gulley complains that he is expected to leave the soap clean after he washes his hands; David will not admit he was wrong about a trivial issue;  Abigail expresses contempt for modern priests who advocate “Singing the Lord’s Prayer, for God’s sake.”

These understated characters live in an understated world of browns, greys and neutrals.  Eigeman took care to find a real old-world Brooklyn pool hall, all varnished paneling and green felt, in which to shoot his pool sequences.  Even the background music is restrained, dominated by folksy acoustic guitars, cellos and drums. 

Chris Eigeman shows considerable skill as both writer and director.  Nevertheless, “Turn the River” never seems to rise above the unlikeliness of its basic story line.  Does Kailey, the card/pool shark, have no other means to secure at least partial custody of her son?  Does her criminal record, which was earned before her pregnancy and marriage, strip her of all parental rights?  Does it really cost $50,000 for two fake passports and a fake gun? And why does worldly-wise Kailey tell David of her plans before she flees to Canada with Gulley, giving him time to call the police and alert the border patrol? 

Why indeed? 

Perhaps Eigeman was trying to show us Kailey’s fatal flaw: trusting David in the first place.  I couldn’t help thinking of the tyrannosaurus rex in Meet the Robinsons, who says, “I have a big head and little arms and I’m just not sure this plan was well thought through.”  Eigeman’s Kailey has guts, but her plan is not well thought through, with tragic results.

The title of the movie is a poker term.  The “river” is the fifth and final community card, put out face up, by itself.  The river can change the fortune of a game by delivering one player a card which she needs to beat another player’s already completed hand.  In the opening scene, Kailey does just this, winning not with skill, but with luck and nerve, setting the stage for a suspenseful high-stakes gamble to get her son back.  If “Turn the River” can be said to have a message, perhaps it is that, while you can’t control which cards you get, you’ll never win big if you bet too low, or fold too soon.

This is a dark movie.  It contains moments of violence which, because they not excessively gory, are all the more horrifying.  This nuclear family is not only splintered, but physically broken: Kailey gets sick repeatedly, David suffers from unexplained nosebleeds, and Gulley has a fractured wrist.  While the ending is predictable, it is not formulaic.  The atmosphere is suffused with fear and suspense.  Terry Kinney as Markus, who provides Kailey with the passports and gun, provides the only light moments.  The underutilized John Juback seethes menacingly as Kailey’s opponent in the big match.  And as she flees, danger lurks everywhere.  Indeed, the film seems to revel in its own grittiness.
In this tale of twisted human relationships playing themselves out in a shadowy world, Eigeman raises a question for everyone who has ever loved another human being: Are you willing to risk everything on the small chance of delivering a person you love from danger?  No one would call Turn the River a hopeful film, but its portrayal of one mother who gambles everything to rescue her boy strikes its one redemptive note. ExileStreet

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