This is a pretty safe and unremarkable project in many regards. The story is appealing as a sort of funny anti-hero, a resourceful guy with an uncontrolled urge to gamble. He steals so he can feed is habit, and everybody around him has money-related interests except himself. It's made more interesting to follow because it's based on a real story, and apparently it follows it quite closely.
Technically it's as good as most of Hollywood makes, competent in every aspect except direction, which is flat and dead. No defined camera stance, merely the basic representation of what's happening.
But nothing of that matters because who the camera frames almost always is the late Seymour Hoffman. And that is more than enough. Every movement counts, every restrained facial sign shows something. He was really a method student, but i suspect he didn't have to search very deep to get to his characters. His most remarkable characters all live in their own world, tormented by uncontrolled urges, in pain by maladjustment to an unforgiving unfit world. His pain was real in every character of his, he just channeled it each time to a different character, to a different world, to a different misfit quirky corner of the world.
It's an extra pain to watch each one of his movies now, when we know we won't see anything new from him ever again, and we understand that not so much of what he showed us was acting, faking on a stage, but instead was the masking of a real pain. Or it could be the other way around. It could be that, in a tragic sense, the high standard that Hoffman proposed for his own craft drained and exhausted the real man so much that he was left in the limbo between his full creations and the emptiness of the somehow unfulfilled real life, whatever that might be.
It's not difficult to watch this film now, and map the gambling urge of Mahowny to the addictions of Hoffman in the real life, and understand that the "just a few more minutes" could in fact be the few more minutes he always requested from himself.
watch this, the film won't change you, but Philip S. Hoffman will.
