The Cooler
The Cooler is a tough movie about a casino worker (William Massey) who is so down that he can make gamblers lose merely by going to their table. Unfortunately, he stumbles into love with one of the casino girls (Maria Bello), and he loses his cooling ability. His old-time boss (Alec Baldwin) is none too pleased, and things get rough. I liked the movie, and a couple of months after seeing it, I see the DVD cover on the store shelf and smile about the romance. The weakness is that the movie is so nitty gritty in its protrayal of the love affair, the tough boss, the con artists, and so on, that the “magic realism” of the cooler being instantly able to turn a gambler’s luck is incongruous. The strength was the cooler himself, on first glance just a loser, but on further acquaintance a decent man of solid character in a corrupt world.
Jim Bell