The Music of Chance

Chance abounds in this intriguing adaptation of Paul Auster's novel, and there's a chance you may like one half and not like the other. Filmmaker Haas moves from documentaries, where he chronicles the lives of visual artists, to features here, and the chances he takes pay off mostly, providing rich performances and an agreeably odd story. Nashe (Patinkin) finds a bloodied Pozzi (Spader) stumbling along a road and gives him a lift. It leads the two into an unlikely partnership for a poker game with a pair of eccentric millionaires, Flower (Durning) and Stone (Grey). When Nashe and Pozzi lose everything in the game, Flower and Stone propose that the two work off their debt by building a wall on their estate, a wall of 10,000 stones. The film's first half carries us through the card game, the second details the building of the wall and the grim realities of servitude to Flower and Stone. Whether by design or not, the film's tone shifts midway through. Initially, it's quite brazen about its quirkiness and allegorical conceits and rather fun. Spader slicks up his portrayal of the garrulous card sharp until it glistens with a Brylcreem sheen. Always attired in oversized outfits, he's an appealingly goofy picture of the talker who isn't as big a man as he thinks. Though considerably more subdued, Durning and Grey give an old-fashioned sparkle to their eccentrics, and the time with them is a metaphysical delight, with musings on the souls of numbers and touring the “City of the World” display, a model train-size layout of a town depicting scenes from Stone's life. Once the film shifts to the wall, it grows progressively darker. Durning and Grey vanish from the scene, and eventually, Spader disappears, too. That leaves Patinkin's Nashe as the focus, and though the character is sympathetic, he is as stony as the wall he is left to build alone. The film has pleasures in its second half -- notably Patinkin's well-crafted performance -- but its end is disappointing given the promise of its beginning. It is not unlike being told to expect a monument and finding instead just a wall.