Sundance ’12: Lay the Favorite

It is easier to get a job in Vegas messengering about large sums of gambling money than a gig as a cocktail waitress. Fortunately, Beth Raymer has a knack with numbers, leading to a checkered career in the betting business. Raymer’s memoir becomes the stuff of light-hearted dramedy in Stephen Frears’ Lay the Favorite (clip here), which screens during this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

“Lay the Favorite” is one of those old school gambler’s expressions Raymer’s new boss Dink Heimowitz uses. Dink Inc is not a bookmaker, it is a betting establishment. Every day Dink and his employees work the phones, placing legal bets around town. As long as he wins fifty-five percent of the time, it’s all good. With Raymer’s arrival, Dink comes out of a losing slump, leading him to conclude the ditz-savant is his good luck charm. This does not sit well with Tulip, Dink’s Bravo reality show worthy wife.

Dink once did time for bookmaking, so now he keep things strictly legit. The emotionally needy Tulip also keeps him on a tight leash, which means the openly flirtatious Raymer has to go. However, Dink becomes increasingly concerned when Raymer gets involved with an outright bookie, so sleazy he has to be played by Vince Vaughn.

In a way, Favorite seems an odd fit for Sundance. It is a very commercial but rather pleasant film that ought to be better suited for a studio release than an art house run. It offers some interesting Damon Runyon-esque peaks into the world of legal and illicit sports betting, but this is definitely a women’s film. Breezy with a periodic outburst of angst, it is probably a lot like what One for the Money should have been (but most likely isn’t).

However, it is supporting characters and slightly sleazy milieu that really make Favorite work. Vaughn does his usual shtick well enough, but Bruce Willis really stands out, perfectly suited for Dink. Like his character, he seems to comfortably fit somewhere in between a romantic lead and a father figure. Nearly unrecognizable, Catherine Zeta-Jones plays Tulip to hilt, with relish. So does Rebecca Hall, but her Raymer often comes across too Erin Brockovichy, which is never good, in any context. At least, she isn’t shy.

Favorite is hardly what we would expect from Frears either, but the Dangerous Liaisons helmer has a nice touch with the material, never letting Raymer’s melodrama overwhelm the upbeat vibe. It is not a big important film, but Favorite is an entertaining diversion, featuring some of Willis’s best work in a while. Recommended in that modest spirit, but not an ultra-high priority at Sundance, it screens again this Saturday (1/28) and Sunday (1/29) in Park City.

South Africa at AFA: The Burning

To its considerable credit, South Africa averted a bloody revolution with institutionalized score-settling. For his cinematic directorial debut, Stephen Frears adapted a Roland Starke short story subtly speculating about the sort of violent conflict that might have been. However, it initially just seems like any other day to one privileged white youngster and his guardian granny in Frears’ The Burning, which screens during the United We Stand: South African Cinema during Apartheid retrospective at Anthology Film Archives.

The little boy is probably not a bad sort, but his grandmother is not particularly “mothering” and the black domestic servants can hardly discipline him. Like every other Thursday, the old woman intends to visit his aunt, as per usual. However, the newspaper never arrived that morning and the radio stations have gone silent. Of course, the regal old woman is hardly interested in news of the outside world anyway, but when they find his Aunt’s home deserted and ransacked, even the boy starts to suspect something might be amiss.

Indeed, the boy learns quite a lesson about his homeland in The Burning. Yet, the irony of the film is that it is not his immediate family who suffer the brunt of this “day of rage,” at least within the thirty minutes of the film. (As for their unwritten future, we can only speculate, grimly.) As a result, Burning stands out in the United We Stand line-up as a particularly bold selection, depicting the brutal injustice that comes with revolution, as well as the inequities of Apartheid.

As a rarely seen film by an accomplished filmmaker, Burning also holds additional appeal to cineastes beyond the scope of the United series. They will not be disappointed. Though it is small in scope, it displays the same sensitivity to character that distinguishes Frears’ later films, like Dirty Pretty Things and The Grifters. Despite the very different contexts, his adept use of the prepubescent boy as an unworldly POV character actually brings to mind Carol Reed’s classic Fallen Idol. Necessarily more than a bit of a snot, Mark Baillie is quite convincing as the little boy. Appropriately though, it is Cosmo Pieterse who really brings a human spark to his role as the unfortunate chauffeur.

For a first film, Burning is quite a mature work, implying volumes while directly showing relatively little. At times it flirts with the surreal, but ultimately this is just a function of its characters headstrong denial. Probably one of the quieter films about violence and injustice, Burning is definitely one of the highlights of AFA’s retrospective look at South African cinema of the Apartheid era. It screens with Sven Persson’s Land Apart this coming Sunday (4/10) and the following Thursday (4/14).