“Ballad of a Small Player” is a heavily stylized film. From the jump, we’re hit with the burning neon of Macao as a sweaty, hungover Lord Doyle (Colin Farrell) wakes up in a hotel suite that looks like it’s been hit by a tornado. Pounding, orchestral music underscores the scenes as he gets ready for the evening, filmmaker Edward Berger giving us just a smidge of the lightly fantastical feel that will characterize the rest of the film.
Berger is no stranger to this type of drama. His many-times-over Oscar-nominated film “Conclave” is as theatrical as they come, with cardinals who feel more like gossipy teenage girls than men of the cloth. But, despite its operatic sense of style, “Ballad of a Small Player” is missing the buoyancy of Berger’s previous film. The stakes feel nonexistent, the characters disconnected, and the whole thing oddly lifeless.
Lord Doyle (if, in fact, that is his real name) is in trouble. He owes a hell of a lot of money to a hell of a lot of people – as he puts it in his opening voiceover, he’s a “high roller on a slippery slope.” He might call himself a lord, but, for the most part, he telegraphs everything you need to know about him through his dress, his rumpled flair, and his half-hearted attempt at a posh English accent – he’s an addict, and a liar. He’s on the run from something, and is almost at the end of his rope.
Doyle has much in common with previous characters of Farrell’s career, but he’s missing a central characteristic. Farrell is so adept at playing petulant man children – disreputable, but with a spark of sadness that evokes a sense of pity from the audience. But any inner sadness that Doyle might have rings hollow. The script, written by Rowan Joffé, overshadows any exploration of the trials of addiction, or of the inner life of this man, with half-hearted mysteries that feel unanchored in character or feeling.
The biggest of these mysteries is Dao Ming (Fala Chen), a casino employee who has debts of her own. She meets Doyle at the baccarat table one evening, and then their paths cross again when a man she gave credit to jumps off of a building because he can’t pay her back. The other characters in “Ballad of a Small Player” are minimal, but at least feel grounded in their own reality. The direction the script takes with Dao Ming, however, robs her of all semblance of character. The romance between her and Doyle will no doubt end tragically (there are no surprises in “Ballad of a Small Player”), but their relationship already felt empty. So, the tragedy falls flat.
That’s the biggest problem with “Ballad of a Small Player” – there are no emotional stakes, and therefore no tension. Throughout the film, Berger plays with the idea of the unreliable narrator. Doyle often wakes up in his hotel room (or other, less savory, places) with no memory of how he got there. He has so many dreams of throwing himself off of buildings that you start to wonder if he already has. But Doyle is so reliable in his unreliability that the mystery loses steam fairly quickly. After a while, the audience begins to spend more time trying to figure out what’s real or not instead of connecting to the character at the center story. At the end of the day, Doyle is a given – he might not have actually thrown himself off a building, but he is in hell, and he will always do just what you expect.
Berger’s visuals almost draw the eye away from the lackluster script, but bright colors and dreamy shots can only distract an audience from a lack of narrative for so long.