Control Nathan Rabin #119 Even Money (2007)

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career and am now in the process of writing about every episode of Batman Beyond for the same insanely generous patron. 

I also recently began an even more screamingly essential deep dive into the complete filmography of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen.  

Or you can be like one very kind, very appreciated soul who suggested Danny DeVito for a theme month and then, when he was unsatisfied with the admittedly half-assed, random assortment of DeVito movies I chose for the month, volunteered to pay for me to write about the DeVito movies he wished I’d covered for the month.

This generous patron gave me a list of possible DeVito movies to write about and I instinctively gravitated to the most obscure movie on the list, even if its obscurity all but ensures an exceedingly modest readership. 

What can I say? I love obscure movies. I love random movies. I love movies that haven’t been forgotten because nobody knew about them in the first place. I love movies with huge movie stars and all the promise in the world that somehow end up amounting to next to nothing. 

I love movies with A-list casts that go direct to video or streaming or receive only a token release. 

In other words, I love movies like 2006’s Even Money, which Danny DeVito produced in addition to costarring in the scene-stealing role of Walter, a lovable magician with a colorful past and a non-existent future. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I strongly dislike movies like Even Money but gravitate towards them all the same because their groaning portentousness and pomposity make them perfect for mockery.

When I started writing for The A.V Club in 1997 I wrote primarily about direct-to-video movies, particularly Tarantino knockoffs, in part because I love trash culture and b-movies and lurid schlock but also because I was terribly insecure and worried that if I wrote about movies people actually cared about readers would realize that I was a terrible writer and I would be exposed as an imposter. 

But if I stayed under the radar by writing almost exclusively about stupid shit that no one cared about, I could keep the elaborate charade that was my professional life going. So I’ve chosen the margins again and again over the course of my career because I feel at home in the dumpster of American cinema, staying cozy and warm in the glow of a cinematic dumpster fire like Even Money. 

Even Money considerately lets us know exactly what kind of a movie it is through the pseudo-poetic, pseudo-philosophical opening words Kelsey Grammer delivers via narration as mustachioed, disabled veteran turned corrupt cop Brunner:  “If you want to know the truth about someone, find their dream and work backward. We’re all chasing something. More money. More love. I don’t know. Maybe just one more chance. What we’re really looking for is more life. Yes sir. More of this beautiful life. But if you’re not careful, you might go looking for more and wind up with less.” 

Rydell’s ponderous drama of fate and destiny labors under the adorable delusion that Grammer is famously a cerebral performer so his words will automatically convey depth and substance. They don’t seem to realize that onscreen and off, Grammer is less an actual intellectual heavyweight than a ridiculous cartoon of a smart person, literally, in the form of Sideshow Bob, and metaphorically as well. 

Even Money is a very stupid movie that thinks it’s very deep, so it makes sense that it casts a dumb person’s conception of an intellectual heavyweight as its world-weary conscience and narrator, even as it limits his role in the actual film to a glorified cameo. 

(world weary blues moan: Tossed salad and scrambled eggs)

The Rose and On Golden Pond director Rydell’s first film as a director since 1994’s Intersection and final film to date can cynically but accurately be summarized as “Crash with gambling instead of racism.” 

Tarantino knockoffs were overwhelmingly trash but the cornerstones of the sub-genre couldn’t be more commercial: movie stars, profanity, violence, attitude, kitschy, ironic use of iconic pop songs and gratuitous borrowing from the greatest action movies ever made. 

The opposite is true of the sad, strange creature known as the Crash wannabe, which is instead defined by infinite sadness, philosophical rumination, loneliness and melancholy souls enduring terrible fates at the hands of a dead and mad God who has given up on humanity. 

Sure, Crash knockoffs like Even Money have stars up the wazoo and crazed melodrama but it’s all in the service of a heavy-handed message that could not be more of a bummer. If the average Tarantino knockoff is about how cool the filmmakers are, the Crash knockoff is instead just terrible the world is. 

Kim Basinger leads a ridiculously over-qualified cast as Caroline Carver, a mother and wife with a dark secret: she tells her family that she’s off writing her second book but she’s actually pumping money into one-armed bandits and squandering the family savings to feed her gambling addiction. 

Caroline seems to live at the casino and stop by her home occasionally to make sure her obnoxious teen daughter is still alive. During her nocturnal wanderings the impossibly attractive novelist strikes up a fragile friendship with Walter, a hard-luck magician played by Danny DeVito. 

Even Money probably would not make a list of my top forty Danny DeVito movies but it beautifully illustrates what makes DeVito such a remarkable performer and national treasure. 

For an inveterate scene stealer, DeVito is a remarkably generous, unselfish performer. He makes everyone around him better. In a comedy, he makes the actors around him funnier; in dramas he’s so innately convincing that he makes his costars believable as well. He’s a motherfucking star but also a consummate team player. That’s a formidable combination.

With DeVito to ground her, Basinger is believable and compelling as a troubled woman who can’t help but be charmed by Walter’s interest in her and belief in her abilities. Without DeVito, the woefully miscast Basinger overacts egregiously. When Caroline finally comes clean to her husband about the severity of her gambling addiction, the result is unfortunately unintentional belly laughs instead of wrenching drama. 

Basinger ands DeVito, a long way from Basinger’s Oscar-winning turn in L.A Confidential, have romantic chemistry that would be shocking if DeVito weren’t such a tremendously appealing figure. DeVito’s big-hearted sleight of hand man is so ingratiating that he actually seems like a much better fit for the gorgeous writer than her husband, a respected academic played by Ray Liotta, who does all of the parenting of the couple’s obnoxious teenaged girl while his wife is out gambling away her college fund. 

Even Money’s screenplay has much to offer DeVito as an actor. It has much less to offer the audience beyond the warmth and pathos of DeVito’s wonderful performance and a similarly intense, poignant performance by Forest Whitaker as Clyde Snow, a gambling addict with a complicated relationship with Godfrey (Nick Cannon), a high school basketball star he convinces to cheat so that he does not end up getting killed by the various bookies he owes money to. 

Rydell is an actor as well as a director. He’s best known for his role as a Jewish gangster in The Long Goodbye so perhaps it’s not surprising that Even Money is an actor’s showcase first and foremost. 

Unfortunately, with the exception of the warm and wonderful DeVito and Whitaker the acting showcased here is sometimes terrible. As Augie, a tough but sensitive bookie, Jay Mohr is cast in a role designed to prove that he can’t just act but ACT. It doesn’t just call for acting: it calls for ACTING! Alas, instead of proving to the world that the Saturday Night Live funnyman is, in fact, a GREAT actor his performance suggests he’s not much of an actor at all. 

That certainly can’t be said of the great Tim Roth, who wastes his talents in the flashily empty role of Victor, a sadistic bookie who takes great delight in flaunting his power and privilege over sad-sack no-hopers like Walter and Augie.

Roth at least seems to be having fun playing a one-dimensional heavy cursed with embodying the cruelty and callousness of fate. 

Name a more iconic duo!

Even Money’s various overwrought plot threads all come together in a climactic high school basketball game that holds the key to the destinies of many of the film’s characters. Usually I hate happy endings, and see them as deeply unearned, but I hated Even Money’s unhappy ending as well because its ugliness and brutality feel as unearned as the pretend happiness of something like The Next Best Thing. 

I was emotionally invested enough in DeVito’s humane, lived-in performance that I was legitimately bummed to see him reach a bad, predictable end. I legit snorted out loud when Even Money decided to pat itself on the back by closing with Caroline signing copies of her second book, which is seemingly about her relationship with Walter. 

The idea, which you find in an awful lot of bad movies, and some good ones, is that what we’ve just seen is so inherently compelling, so innately entertaining and utterly fascinating that if it were translated into literary form it would of course become a wildly acclaiming, award-winning best-seller.

Grammer’s wise shamus returns at the end of the film to deliver more hard-boiled wisdom, using many of the same words and phrases he employed at the very beginning. 

The world-weary, “wise” gumshoe wraps everything up with a tidy little bow, letting us know at the end, just as he did at the beginning, that the sorry spectacle we endured is devoid of insight, devoid of wit and devoid of grace or soul. 

This hammy insult of a monologue drives home the overwrought emptiness of this misbegotten production, which sets out to say so much and ends up saying so little. DeVito and Whitaker elevate the material but even with their extraordinary performances, Even Money barely rises to the level of watchable mediocrity. 

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