I'm a sucker for Brit noir, and Mike Hodge's Croupier (1998) is an outstanding example of the genre, a tough, compelling flick with solid performances from Clive Owen and ER's Alex Kingston. (I'm not really qualified to say whether Kingston's South African accent is believable, but it's outrageously sexy.)
Owen's Jack Manfred is a struggling writer who trained as a croupier in South Africa's Sun City but grew disgusted with that life and turned his back on it. His girlfriend Marion (Gina McKee, in a sympathetic perfomance) wants him to finish his book, but when his gambler father sets him up with a job at a London casino, he can't resist its dark appeal. It's not the money, although Jack needs it badly, or the nightlife, although that seduces him eventually. It's a darker desire to take out his resentments vicariously, skillfully assisting as people destroy themselves at the gaming tables.
Hodge and writer Paul Mayersburg use Owen's voiceover to great effect, and the movie's philosophy is neatly summarized in a quote from A Farewell to Arms that Jack recalls as he's on the verge of realizing one dream but has another brutally snatched from his grasp:
The world breaks everyone, and afterwards many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break, it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these, you can be sure it will kill you too, but there will be no special hurry.
(Spoilers ahead.)
There's something charming about a struggling writer in a contemporary film quoting Hemingway. I know the old guy's far out of favor these days, but Farewell is one of my favorite books, and I even had that passage marked in my tattered 1932 Modern Library edition. It begins:
Often a man wishes to be alone and a girl wishes to be alone too and if they love each other they are jealous of that in each other, but I can truly say we never felt that. We could feel alone when we were together, alone against the others. It has only happened to me like that once. I have been alone while I was with many girls and that is the way that you can be most lonely. But we were never lonely and never afraid when we were together. I know that the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started. But with Catherine there was almost no difference in the night except that it was an even better time. If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them…
Marion is the heart of what is good and gentle and brave in Croupier, so her death is inevitable. And Jack owes his survival and his ultimate success as a writer to his insufficiencies; despite a number of fine qualities, he is neither good nor gentle nor brave. But despite–or perhaps because of–these weaknesses, we empathize with him; he's flawed, but he suffers, as we do, and he's trying to do his best, as we are.
Croupier's ending is unsettlingly upbeat, but it doesn't feel like a grafted-on attempt at crowd-pleasing–more like an intentional reminder of life's complexity. And I suppose it's this combination of superficial thrills and subterranean philosophy that make noirs so appealing to me.
(Hodges and Owen reunited five years later in I'll Sleep When I'm Dead with Charlotte Rampling, which seemed promising but turned out to be a disappointment.)