Colin Farrell wanders Macau in ‘Ballad of a Small Player’

The actor plays the slick, besuited Lord Doyle—or so he calls himself—an aristocratic English high roller with some secrets he’d rather keep buried. When photographer and private eye Cynthia Blithe (Tilda Swinton) comes snooping, he tries to pay her off while scrambling to pay back his debts to his luxury hotel. In search of an illegal line of credit, he finds his way to an underground baccarat game, and crosses paths with an attractive dealer, Dao Ming (Fala Chen), perhaps the only woman in Macau who understands his predicament, given her own tab with some unsavory characters.

While the film lives in the body of a crime caper, its spirit is that of a fever dream bolstered by superstition. Its references are, at times, extremely heavy handed—like when numerous characters (including Dao) make reference to the ongoing Hungry Ghosts or Zhongyuan Festival, in which spirits are said to wander the Earth. Doyle, a man escaping his dangerous creditors, is practically a dead man walking, and he even has visions of his own violent demise, occasionally seeing himself through the eyes of other people who die or take their own lives, before he wakes up in a fright. However, this psychological aspect to the story, and the Chinese holiday fueling it, are used to welcome a handful of aesthetic flourishes that quickly subside. What’s more, the aforementioned ghost tale broadcasts the movie’s biggest turns long in advance. It’s all a bit loosey-goosey.

Colin Farrell as Lord Doyle and Fala Chen as Dao Ming.

Courtesy of Netflix

Given the movie’s whizbang unfurling, nearly everyone around Doyle feels underwritten, especially Dao, who largely serves to guide him, and whose own complex inner life is relegated to one’s imagination. However, in using the bright lights of Macau as a geographical backdrop, Ballad of a Small Player comes within inches of genuine insight into how the characters see themselves, and present themselves. The dazzling, Vegas-like locale is rife with gilded artifice—the very same kind that Doyle puts on as a faux one percenter—but there are enough hints about its seedy underbelly that we know not to trust the place. The same is true of the film’s two-faced protagonist, often labelled a “gweilo” by the locals. The word, in Cantonese, usually refers to white outsiders, but fittingly, its literal translation is akin to calling Doyle a ghost—an irony he never picks up on when he drops sincere pleas to Dao, along the lines of, “I may be a ‘gweilo’ but I still have a soul.”

Although Berger seldom pierces Doyle’s exterior, or externalizes his true fears and desires, his images—courtesy of cinematographer James Friend—appear with a sickly palette. The frame is bright and saturated to the point of hungover nausea, and the camera tilts and spins through luxuriant spaces, while Volker Bertelmann’s eerie score rattles like an electronic currency counter. The camera may not dig deep beneath the surface of its setting or lead character, but what it captures superficially has a tendency to look (if not feel) magnificent. Farrell approaches the role as though Doyle is a man in the throes of withdrawal, sweating and spasming his way through otherwise unassuming dialogue scenes as he reaches voraciously, and gluttonously, for decadent meals of lobster and caviar, knowing full well he doesn’t have the means to pay. His spirit is rotten, but his physical form is so addicted to the material world (and to the thrill of trying to attain it) that who he truly is becomes gradually subsumed by who he pretends to be. His crisp leather gloves bend playing cards uncomfortably—almost disrespectfully. His posh exterior goes hand-in-hand with an utter disregard for the tools through which he earns his cash. The same can be said of how carelessly he treats other people.

Fala Chen as Dao Ming in "Ballad of a Small Player."

Courtesy of Netflix

While this flagrant disregard is a key facet of the character, it also applies to the film at large. Doyle cares about Dao, his pseudo romantic interest, only when it suits him, but in the process, Ballad of a Small Player ends up sidelining her as well, turning her into an empty vessel for his anxieties. Rowan Joffé’s screenplay reveals a clear adoration for Macau as a setting, but only inasmuch as it harms or benefits his gweilo anti-hero. As the movie trudges along, to a twist so inevitable you often forget it hasn’t yet been revealed, the story’s increasingly outstretched telling is held together only by Farrell’s fearless body language, as a man coming apart at the seams, literally and symbolically biting off more than he can chew until the city consumes him.

Unfortunately, like his central character, Berger takes on more than he can handle. Given its dramatic and visceral potential, a film with the rapid-fire energy of Ballad of a Small Player should feel vital, and vigorous. Instead, it drags and meanders in search of meaning it seldom finds, gesturing towards cultural and religious ideas that open up a whole host of narrative and visual possibilities, but end up reduced to cheap tricks.