hard 8 movie review

John C. Reilly and Philip Baker Hall in "Hard Eight" (aka "Sydney").

The man’s face is sad and lined, and he lights cigarettes as if he’s been living in casinos for centuries. He has a deep, precise voice: We get a quick impression that he knows what he thinks and says what be believes. His name is Sydney, and he has found an unshaven young bum dozing against the wall of a coffee shop and offered him a cup of coffee and a cigarette.

Why? The answer is the engine behind the first half of “Hard Eight.” I am not sure it is ever fully answered, or needs to be. Sydney ( Philip Baker Hall ) is a man who has been gambling for a long time, and knows a lot about the subject, and shares his knowledge with the kid because–well, maybe just because he has it to share.

The kid is named John ( John C. Reilly ). He needs $6,000 to bury his mother and has lost everything. Step by step, Sydney teaches him some ropes, like how to start with $150 and recycle it through the casino cashier cages until he seems to have spent $2,000 in the casino, and is given a free room. This opening sequence is quietly fascinating: I like movies that show me precisely how to get away with something. At the end of the process, it’s funny how John, now that he’s in his own room, becomes the genial host. “Free movies on TV?” he asks Sydney. “Drink from the mini-bar?”

Two years pass. Sydney and John are still friends, John dressing like Sydney and even ordering the same drinks. We begin to understand more about the older man. He is a gentleman, with a deep courtesy. He watches the waitress Clementine ( Gwyneth Paltrow ) flirt with a table of drunks, asks her if she “has” to do that to keep her job and says, “You don’t have to do that with me.”

John and Clementine become a couple, even though it’s clear Clemmie does some hooking on the side. John also makes a friend of an ominous man named Jimmy ( Samuel L. Jackson ), who Sydney doesn’t trust. “What do you do?” Sydney asks him. “I do some consulting, security, help out on busy nights,” Jimmy says. “Parking lot?” says Sydney. “No, I’m inside,” Jimmy says, but Sydney’s shot has found its target.

By this point in the film, its writer-director, Paul Thomas Anderson , has us so hooked that we’re watching for the sheer pleasure of the dialogue and the acting. Anderson has a good ear. Sydney says precisely what he means. John’s statements are based more on hope than reality. Clementine says what she thinks people want to hear. Jimmy likes to say things that are probably not true, and then look at you to see if you’ll challenge him. All of them live in the 24-hour days of Reno, where gambling is like a drumbeat in the back of everything they do.

There turns out to be a kind of a plot (a customer doesn’t pay Clementine $300, and John gets violent and then calls Sydney to help him out of a mess). There is even a secret from the past, although not the one we expect. But the movie isn’t about a plot. It’s about these specific people in this place and time, and that’s why it’s so good: It listens and sees. It observes, and in that it takes its lead from Sydney, who is a student of human nature and plays the cards of life very, very close to his vest.

Philip Baker Hall has been in the movies since 1975, and has been on a lot of TV shows, even “Seinfeld.” He’s familiar, in a way: He looks middle-aged and a little sad. And grown up. Many Americans linger in adolescence, but Hall is the kind of man who puts on a tie before he leaves the house. In 1985, he gave one of the great performances in American movies, in a one-man show, playing Richard Nixon in Robert Altman’s “ Secret Honor .” Here is another great performance. He is a man who has been around, who knows casinos and gambling, who finds himself attached to three people he could easily have avoided, who thinks before he acts.

Movies like “Hard Eight” remind me of what original, compelling characters the movies can sometimes give us. Like David Mamet’s “ House of Games ” or Mike Figgis’ “ Leaving Las Vegas ,” or the documentary “ Crumb ,” they pay attention to the people who inhabit city nights according to their own rules, who have learned from experience and don’t like to make the same mistake twice. At one point, when Clementine asks him a question, Sydney says, “You shouldn’t ask a question like that unless you know the answer.” It’s not so much what he says as how he says it.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

• Samuel L. Jackson as Jimmy
• Philip Baker Hall as Sydney
• Gwyneth Paltrow as Clementine
• John C. Reilly as John

Written and Directed by

• Paul Thomas Anderson

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February 28, 1997 Hard Eight By STEPHEN HOLDEN sullen young roustabout slumped outside a diner off a desert highway near Las Vegas, Nev., s approached by a well-dressed older man with bags under his eyes and a poker face who offers to buy him coffee. Suspicious but hungry, the young man, John (John C. Reilly) accepts, and over breakfast, Sydney (Philip Baker Hall), the grimly formal stranger who accosted him, poses a question, "If I were to give you $50, what would you do with it?" As "Hard Eight" tracks the mentor-protege relationship that Sydney cultivates with a gravity befitting Rod Serling introducing "The Twilight Zone," the movie smells like one of David Mamet's fiendish stories of grifters embroiled in tricky games of cat and mouse. But Paul Thomas Anderson, who wrote and directed the movie, which is his first feature film, has other things on his mind. Sydney's motives aren't revealed until the film is almost over. Let it suffice to say they have to do with guilt and with a warped, grandiose sense of honor. One of the many strengths of this beautifully controlled, slow-moving film is that the revelations come as a complete surprise at the same time that they make psychological sense. Not only that, but Hall's portrayal of a mysterious father figure whose air of unbreachable solemnity borders on caricature is in keeping with who Sydney turns out to be. After their coffee klatch, Sydney drives John back to Las Vegas, where he gives him $150 to gamble in an elaborately specific way that enables John to secure himself free hotel accommodations for the night. The story then jumps ahead two years. By now, Sydney and John have become a team of low-rolling gamblers working their way around the Nevada casino circuit, and John idolizes Sydney to the point of trying to dress like him. In Reno, John has befriended a cocky security guard named Jimmy (Samuel L. Jackson) who is cynical and profane and likes to drink. Although Sydney can't stand his protege's new friend, he swallows his distaste. But Jimmy still senses Sydney's contempt and chafes under it. John has also fallen in love with Clementine (Gwyneth Paltrow), a cocktail waitress and occasional prostitute with smeary lipstick, chipped nail polish and too much kohl under her eyes. Sydney, whom Clementine deferentially refers to as "the Captain," cautiously supports the relationship. Then, one evening, John, in a panic, summons Sydney to his motel room, where a man he describes as a hostage lies unconscious, copiously bleeding from his head onto a pillow. Clementine sits in one corner, her head in her hands. Instead of walking out on a scene that spells disaster, Sydney, the unflappable problem solver, sets to work cleaning up the situation. To give away any more of the story would spoil the suspense that "Hard Eight" works so diligently to sustain. This is a film in which every beat of dialogue, every camera angle and every note of slinky background lounge music has been calculated to create a mood of faintly sleazy cool. The story is set during Christmas. And in one scene the sound of a dead-voiced lounge singer groaning "O Little Town of Bethlehem" leaks into the corners of the film, adding just the right note of queasiness and bad faith. "Hard Eight" is not a movie that wants to make a grand statement. It is really little more than a small resonant mood piece whose hard-bitten characters are difficult to like. But within its self-imposed limitations, it accomplishes most of what it sets out to do. And the acting is wonderfully understated, economical and unsentimental. Hall's Sydney is a sleek 90s version of an Edward G. Robinson character playing his cards extremely close to the vest without even a hint of vulnerability on his ravaged face. Reilly and Ms. Paltrow play impulsive, not-very-bright people who are too buffeted by life to be able to plan ahead or even to think clearly in moments of crisis. But instead of telegraphing their characters' limitations, they allow us to discover them for ourselves. The role of Jimmy is one of Jackson's scarier characters, and this brilliant actor inhabits all four corners of his jittery, avaricious personality. When he and Sydney finally clash, the movie makes its darkest, cleverest turn into film-noir nightmare. PRODUCTION NOTES HARD EIGHT Rating: "Hard Eight" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or guardian). It has profanity and violence. Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson; director of photography, Robert Elswit; edited by Barbara Tulliver; music by Michael Penn and Jon Brion; production designer, Nancy Deren; produced by Robert Jones and John Lyons; released by Rysher Entertainment. Running time: 101 minutes. Cast: Philip Baker Hall (Sydney), John C. Reilly (John), Gwyneth Paltrow (Clementine), Samuel L. Jackson (Jimmy) and F. William Hoffman (Hostage).

• Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM)

Summary Sydney (Hall) is a poker-faced professional gambler with a soft heart for a hard luck story. He plays guardian angel to unlucky John (Reilly) and a hooker, Clementine (Paltrow), whom he grows to love like family. When John's and Clementine's honeymoon night leads to a disastrous hostage situation, Sydney takes care of it, as usual. But w ... Read More

Directed By : Paul Thomas Anderson

Written By : Paul Thomas Anderson

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What it's about.

Already featuring some of the desperation and melancholy that would go on to characterize most of his work, Paul Thomas Anderson's Hard Eight manages to draw palpable suspense and drama out of, essentially, three characters and a couple of seedy locations. We learn perhaps too little about these characters and why this veteran gambler is drawn to a young homeless man, but there's also something intriguing about how Anderson suggests much larger and much crueler stories going on just out of sight. It truly feels like these people are just trying to hold on to the smallest things that ease their pain—which works because of incredibly compelling work from Philip Baker Hall, John C. Reilly, and a young Gwyneth Paltrow already at the top of her game.

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Hard Eight (United States, 1997)

Inertia. The dictionary defines it as "a property of matter by which it remains at rest or in uniform motion," and this is an apt descriptor for Paul Thomas Anderson's debut feature, Hard Eight . During the first half, virtually nothing happens -- the characters are stuck in a stasis from which escape seems impossible. Then, during the second half, momentum carries the story to its inescapable conclusion. The dualistic nature of Hard Eight makes it a difficult picture to size up. At times, it's engrossing, but, on other occasions, it's a lesson in frustration.

Hard Eight opens with a fascinating, twenty-minute prologue. A dapper, elderly gentleman named Sydney (Philip Baker Hall), approaches a disheveled, younger man, John (John C. Reilly), outside a roadside diner. Sydney invites John to join him for a cup of coffee and a cigarette. Inside, they talk. John's on his way back from Vegas, where he lost all his money trying to win enough to bury his mother. Sydney thinks his intentions are admirable, and offers him an opportunity: come back to Vegas and learn how to get a free room and maybe even win a little extra cash. Sydney's scam is deceptively simple and undeniably effective, and Anderson presents it with flair and an undercurrent of wry humor.

The rest of Hard Eight takes place two years later in Reno, when Sydney and John are good friends. Theirs is a father/son relationship, with John never far from Sydney's side. As John's girlfriend, waitress/prostitute Clementine (Gwyneth Paltrow), observes to the older man, "He follows you and worships you like you're a captain." Clementine's actions soon introduce new obstacles in Sydney and John's friendship, as do those of a seedy security advisor named Jimmy (Samuel L. Jackson).

Hard Eight borrows its share of conventions from noir thrillers, but this is more of a character drama than anything else. Sure, there's some violence, gunplay, and a few plot twists, but everything keeps coming back to the relationship between Sydney, an aging man with an opaque past, and John, the damaged and none-too-bright individual he takes under his wing. Clementine too is one of life's castoffs, but Sydney's interest in her is primarily as a companion for his surrogate son. As much as Sydney likes Clementine, however, that's how much he dislikes Jimmy, whose vulgar, arrogant manner marks him as trouble from the beginning.

I said earlier that portions of Hard Eight are frustrating. Indeed, some scenes are almost painful to watch because of everyone's inability to act decisively. People talk and talk and talk, but the words don't mean anything, and nothing gets resolved. Characters frequently speak in an elliptical manner, taking forever to get to the point. It's the inertia thing. There's a palpable reluctance to change to status quo. Once it's altered, however, the chain-reaction is forceful and unstoppable.

Anyone expecting the high-octane, pop-saturated drive of Pulp Fiction will be disappointed. Hard Eight is a different sort of movie altogether. In fact, it owes more to films like The Music of Chance than to Tarantino's effort. The dialogue is rich but never glib, and the characters, all pictures of loneliness in one way or another, are carefully drawn and developed. In fact, about the only elements Pulp Fiction and Hard Eight have in common are stylistic similarities grounded in the noir tradition and effective performances by the always-solid Samuel L. Jackson.

Jackson is great, as is Gwyneth Paltrow, but those two only have supporting roles. The core of Hard Eight , and the reason to see it, is the dynamic between Philip Baker Hall's Sydney and John C. Reilly's John. Hall, who once stunned audiences with his amazing portrayal of Richard Nixon in Robert Altman's Secret Honor , is especially noteworthy. Though Sydney exudes a confident, assured manner, it doesn't take long for us to recognize the desperation and loneliness eating away at him from within. Hall brings this out subtlety, through a carefully-modulated performance that will linger in the mind long after the details of Hard Eight 's minimalist plot have faded.

Hard Eight perhaps teases us with more than it delivers. The casino scenes have a sense of energy and verisimilitude that isn't always present when the action switches to swank hotel room and sleazy dives. Yet there's something almost hypnotic about the way Hard Eight develops -- even in its slowest, most tedious moments, it keeps our attention. And, at a time when independent films are relying ever more on comfortable formulas, that's something of an accomplishment.

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Hard Eight Review

01 Jan 1996

100 minutes

Hard-faced, silent and self-assured mystery character Sydney (Philip Baker Hall) happens upon a bloodless wanderer John (Reilly) one day at a diner and invites him for a ciggie and a dose of caffeine. It unfolds that the downtrodden John has just ambled in from Vegas, having failed to win the $6,000 he needs to bury his mother. Sydney takes him under his wing and whisks him back to Vegas to tutor him in the ways of gambling Fast forward two years, and the two are hanging out in a fast-paced Reno, having forged a close friendship.

Enter stage left a jackpot cast list with Paltrow as a Showgirl-ish off-kilter waitress called Clementine while Jackson plays Jimmy, a casino security man with a voracious sexual appetite.

Everyone becomes disastrously sidetracked as a romance between John and Clementine leads to a menacing kidnapping episode and Sydney, who now loves John and Clementine as if they were his own children, becomes embroiled in a nastier-by-the-minute situation. Alas, you can see the maniacal gun-toting denouement a mile off and this weakens the ensuing drama immensely.

There is some choice dialogue and slick scenes set around the spiky glamour of a Reno gambling hall, but while the cast do well, they are bogged down in what is a slow, lumbering thriller.

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Movies | 04 07 2016

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Release details.

• Duration: 101 mins

Cast and crew

• Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
• Screenwriter: Paul Thomas Anderson
• Philip Baker Hall
• John C Reilly
• Samuel L Jackson
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• F William Parker

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Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘Hard Eight’, AKA ‘Sydney’: “It’s Always Good to Meet a New Friend”

Hard Eight , AKA Sydney poster art by Rich Kelly, https://www.rfkelly.com/hard-eight

By Tim Pelan

Paul Thomas Anderson’s debut film Hard Eight (working title Sydney , preferred by Anderson, thwarted by his backers) arose from the performance of a veteran actor who caught his eye in Martin Brest’s Midnight Run —Philip Baker Hall. In a handful of brief scenes, Hall’s Las Vegas-based fixer for Dennis Farina’s frustrated crime boss Jimmy Serrano essays a calm, sharp, mannered stillness, with a certain old-school charm and pointed delivery. Anderson caught the film on its release in 1988. At the time, he was a precocious talent at Montclair Prep School in San Fernando Valley, under the good-humored tutelage of Principal Carole Stevens. In a piece on the director’s early years for Esquire , “Not long afterward, Anderson walked into Stevens’s office and handed her a piece of paper. ‘This will be my next film,’ he told her. Scribbled on the paper was one word: Sydney.” It didn’t quite become his next film, although it was his first feature after his debut short, Cigarettes and Coffee , which did at least feature Hall (the director as a young man had previously got to know the actor working as a PA on a PBS film). He laid his script on Hall, who he’d already admired for his roaring one-man performance as self-pitying, railing ex-President Nixon in Robert Altman’s ace one-hander, Secret Honor . Cigarettes and Coffee was a twisty character piece about a young gambler who thinks his wife is having an affair, who goes on to seek advice from an older mentor figure. It’s no stretch to see this develop into the main plotline of Hard Eight , about the Sydney from Midnight Run , a few years older, possibly surviving on the fringes of a life he once had after his boss Serrano is taken down. One day, seemingly out of the blue in a Reno coffee shop, Sydney takes a broken and forlorn young man, John, played by John C. Reilly, under his wing. He teaches him gambling tips to survive and blossom, until an unexpected series of events threatens to blow his house of cards down.

Sydney thrives on the craps tables and “old timer” games of the Reno casinos. Tracking and steadicam shots would become a signature move in Anderson’s later films but here they are used sparingly, except for one bravura shot. Kevin B. Lee has done a video essay for BFI on the progression of the director’s steadicam shots in his career. In the transcript on Hard Eight , he observes:

“In his first feature, Anderson’s use of Steadicam already exploits the dramatic qualities of cinematography, juxtaposing Sydney’s dynamic movement against other gamblers seated like zombies at their slots and screens. The camera whips to a side-angle view of Sydney, tracking him laterally; in doing so it seems to pass through walls of ordinary gamblers. It then opens into a wider view of the floor, a panorama of light and sound, both realistic and expressive.

  No other shots are as flashy as this one in Hard Eight , a fairly low-key drama led by a reserved, even inscrutable lead performance. But Anderson allows this one shot to give a glimpse into Sydney’s subjective experience, the thrill of walking the casino floor. It’s a precocious display of character development achieved purely through camera movement and staging. The camera revels in this sensory landscape and simultaneously transcends it, as Sydney advances to his rightful place at the head of the craps table.”

How did he come to make this as his debut feature? From a snippet of an uncredited interview: “I had only written maybe one or two other scripts that I didn’t really like that much and I liked this one and it seemed that I could do it. It seemed that I could make a movie which was small with only four characters in Reno, Nevada and that I could raise money for it. It was really all I had.” Hall had thought the script for Cigarettes and Coffee was spectacular. “I was wondering, who was the first actor in the seventeenth century to see a Shakespeare script, and did he know what he was reading? I certainly knew what I had in my hand.” That’s why he didn’t need to be asked twice to reprise the role of Sydney.

Sydney’s quiet, becalmed old-school demeanor ruffles the feathers of a brash young gambler, rolling that “hard eight” and taunting his Zen-like opposite—a neophyte Philip Seymour Hoffman . “When we filmed Hard Eight ,” Hall recalled to Rolling Stone after Hoffman’s tragic demise, “I was shocked at his ability to improvise his way through. He improvised most of that craps scene and just had such a sense for timing. At that point, I was older and he was very young. I was like, ‘Who is this kid?’ He was so aware of everything and had the instinct of an older trooper. As I began to know him better and work with him more, I realized he was a genius and operating at a different level than the rest of us.”

  Anderson shot the film in a tight twenty-eight days and edited it in three weeks. He spent a year in dispute with his backers over the final cut. The film essentially became his again when he recut it from the workprint at his own expense after it was accepted into the Un Certain Regard section of the 1996 Cannes Film Festival. He told Total Film in an interview in their March 2008 issue, to publicize There Will Be Blood , “The scrappiness was there to begin with. Coming from a big family… My God. We all fight all the time. But at the same time, nobody’s fight lasts more than five minutes. I certainly have that in me naturally, but going through what we went through on that first film was mad. It created such paranoia, such over-protectiveness. That said, I did things in the process that didn’t help it along. I could have been more diplomatic. But I was so arrogant. I simply thought it was my job to do this movie as best I can. It was so naïve to think I didn’t have to manage the people who were paying for it!”

Right from the start of his career, he gets up close to his actors, hugging the camera. Hall again, from the Hard Eight DVD commentary:

“When it’s possible—in terms of the type of scene it is, where the camera is, how close the actors are to the lens and to the camera itself—Paul gets himself down in and under and around the camera. He curls in down there somewhere… so that he has eye contact with you all the time. Now, many directors don’t do this, many directors watch the box–many directors don’t even watch the box, they stand off to the side somewhere, I don’t know what they’re looking at—but Paul gets right down in there so that it’s very intimate… And it could be disconcerting. Paul might be two or three feet away from you and locking eyes right into you. There’s something about the hard focus and his physical presence… inches away, that gives a kind of a dynamic to the performance that I’m not sure that you can achieve in quite the same way. Or any other way. It’s unusual. There are other directors who do this, I’ve seen this a couple of times, but Paul does it on virtually every shot… It’s almost like he is helping to will the appropriate performance from you… I always sensed… I sensed his will. He wanted this thing in a certain way.”

  The film, therefore, benefits from a lack of “showiness,” forcing the audience to lean in and listen to the gaps between the words, the play of emotion across faces, the “tells” and poker expressions. Sydney doesn’t know the meaning of the word “redundancy”—he says and reveals exactly what he means to. John is a naif, saying what he thinks people want to hear. Even when he learns the skills Sydney divests, he never develops a hard carapace (amusingly, on “winning” a hotel room and dinner for the night after Sydney teaches him his first lesson on the casino floor, a slow trickle of information to the audience also, he plays the genial host). Gwyneth Paltrow is Clementine, a charming waitress bruised by life’s knocks, who Sydney maneuvers John into falling for. They are the seeming innocents he hopes will fill the gap where once his grown son and daughter occupied. She does a bit of her own hustling on the side, caught in a bind between being caught for sleeping with customers, and ignoring their advances and again getting sacked for losing the casino sucker’s bread. Her reluctance to give up even after John makes his intentions known (they get married on a whim) almost threatens to derail everything in the little group’s embryonic ordered world. Film Comment described the pair as being “superb at catching the precise blend of naïveté and fecklessness in their characters: each is just smart enough to know what they need to lie about, and desperate enough to believe the lies until the lies die gasping for fresh inspiration.”

John’s newer friend Jimmy (Samuel L. Jackson) is a verbose, coarse and showy Casino “security guy” who possibly overstates his importance and connections, but definitely knows there’s more to the eye as to why Sydney has taken John under his wing—a violent tragic backstory. The tale then becomes a kind of battle for the innocent John’s soul between two older, wiser father figures who each recognize the sourness at the heart of their opposite. Intimacy and openness are often thwarted or held at bay, as shown in Anderson’s framing of actors in uncomfortably long close-ups of the actors looking straight towards the camera, the other actor in conversation deliberately out of shot. It forces the actors to give the performance he wants, robbing them of collaborative variability. From Senses of Cinema :

“The opening encounter between Sydney and John, a five-and-a-half minute dialogue scene, comprises an almost fanatical adherence to the shot-reverse-shot structure. But it’s a full three minutes into the sequence before we get an over-the-shoulder shot. Until then, both characters are shot front-on, the camera offering the point-of-view of their interlocutor. After a cut to a two-shot to incorporate an interruption by a waitress, Anderson returns to the shot-reverse-shot rhythm, this time from over-the-shoulder. The respite is brief, however, since Sydney soon gets up from the table and the final minute-and-a-half separates the actors again.”

  Anderson’s eye settles on odd little incidental details—John exchanges small talk with a bride in full wedding dress and incongruous neck brace playing the slot machines; he yelps for a bucket as a diligent spell yields a fountain of coinage; and as Sydney and Clementine talk at a table, a sudden ruckus nearby yields a whip-pan to focus on the next table’s folk, before panning back to Clementine’s screwed up What-was-that-all-about face. And life goes on.

Jimmy’s actions bring the monster beneath Sydney’s glacial cool not exactly roaring back, but quietly stewing, biding its time. In a move possibly cribbed by Martin Campbell for Daniel Craig’s James Bond debut Casino Royale (and mirrored by Marc Forster in its companion piece, Quantum of Solace ), Sydney quietly waits in the dark for Jimmy to come home from gambling his ill-gotten extorted gains (luckily for Sydney, he made good on a hard eight role), pistol pointed at the door. The No-Name Movie Blog puts it nicely, stating that, “this is fully Philip Baker Hall’s movie, and in the end it’s a movie about a man who has lost everything so many times he seems to have almost forgotten how to be the monster you sense he was. He just wants people around him, even if those people will be the end of him. Every other character seems to try his patience, but he seems like he wouldn’t have it any other way. In the end, being uncertain and gambling it all on other people is better than the alternative—endless days spent playing the conservative gambles at casinos who all know his name.”

Whereas Bond shoots his cuffs with insouciance after his latest escapade, Sydney, back at the Reno coffee shop where the sins of the past caught up with him as he met and recognized John, tugs his jacket sleeve down over a spot of blood on his pristine white cuff, a shabbily shameful gesture. Sometimes, it’s not “always good to meet a new friend.”

Tim Pelan was born in 1968, the year of ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ (possibly his favorite film), ‘Planet of the Apes,’ ‘The Night of the Living Dead’ and ‘Barbarella.’ That also made him the perfect age for when ‘Star Wars’ came out. Some would say this explains a lot. Read more »

In the video above, Paul Thomas Anderson and Philip Baker Hall on filmmaking. Both men break down the 15+ minute Motel scene in Hard Eight . Philip Baker Hall also talks about the differences and challenges between cinema and theater acting and directing.

  The emerging filmmaker conversations with Sundance Lab fellows Paul Thomas Anderson, From Here To Houdini’s House , written By Saida Shepard.

In January of 1993, Paul Thomas Anderson’s first film, a short called Cigarettes and Coffee , screened at the Sundance Film Festival. To make the film, Anderson pooled friends, acquaintances, and resources from his years as a production assistant. Cigarettes and Coffee inspired Anderson’s feature film script, Sydney , which he brought to the 1993 Filmmakers Lab. At the Lab, Anderson took portions of Sydney through a dress-rehearsal process, working with actors, workshopping his script, and learning about film industry politics. Sydney , later renamed Hard Eight , initiated Anderson into the challenge of retaining directorial control amid the promises and pitfalls of The Business . Anderson’s second feature, Boogie Nights , documents the makeshift family of a porn production empire from the excesses of the 1970s into the changing climate of the 1980s. At twenty-seven, Paul Thomas Anderson has been compared to Robert Altman for his ensemble work, and to Martin Scorsese for his anthropological detail. In this interview, part of a series with Lab alumni, Anderson talks about his start as a director, the lessons he’s learned from making two features, and his plans to make many more: “Either like thirty, if I continue to smoke; maybe forty if I quit.” What were you doing before the Lab? I wasn’t doing a goddamn thing. I’d worked as a P.A. for a long time, so I had a lot of access to people and camera packages, and I had some money and my girlfriend’s credit cards, and when I came up with the short Cigarettes and Coffee , essentially it was kind of an all or nothing situation. I put everything into this short, and then it was shown at Sundance. I had just written Sydney , or Hard Eight , rather. At that time it was called Sydney . And [Feature Film Program Director] Michelle Satter read it and she really liked it, and she saved my life by inviting me to the Lab. I really, literally, didn’t have anything to do. It was January, and I figured I’d be getting a job or something. I had no backup plan. In my egotistical, insane way, I was just sure that someone like her was going to come along. And she did. Did the idea for Sydney grow out of your short? No, it just grew out of the same actor. Philip Baker Hall was an actor who was in my short, who I really admired. And I wanted to get to know more about him. So my thinking in writing Sydney was that it was a kind of love letter, trying to figure out this man I didn’t really know. How was the Lab? I was initially kind of skeptical about it. Then I got there, and I just fuckin’ went crazy. I was very fortunate to have the actors who were going to be in the movie—Philip Baker Hall and John C. Reilly—with me. I mean, I met all these directors that I admired, like Michael Caton-Jones and John Schlesinger, and that was really quite a big deal. I remember [Artistic Director] Jeremy Kagan saying, “You’re here to fuck up, and then fuck up better the next day.” When someone says that, you’re ready to go. The best part of it for me was the Screenwriters Lab, because that’s where I got to meet three friends, three people who are very very close to me now, Richard LaGravenese, Todd Graff, and Scott Frank. They were advisors and just so dedicated to kicking my ass. And I needed my ass kicked.   In what areas did you need ass kicking? I knew that my sensibility wasn’t incredibly art house, and I knew that my sensibility wasn’t incredibly Batman . I knew that I loved both sides of the spectrum. I had written a movie that was very small and intimate. And I said, “You know, I think I need a little bit of help, because this is reading and seeming to me like a movie that could play at the Nuart for a week, and I really don’t want to make a movie that plays at the Nuart for a week. I want to make a movie that people will come and see, and I need help in that department.” I was sort of shamelessly saying that I didn’t want to do a small movie. And of course it turned out that it played at the Nuart for a week. So a lot of fucking help they were! Was there an experience or conversation at the Lab that ultimately shifted a direction of the film? I had written a scene where two people talk about doing a scam. I had written one guy telling another guy about a scam that he could pull to get a free hotel in Vegas. I sat down with Richard LaGravenese, and he said, “Why am I reading about this? Why am I not seeing it?” And I thought, “Well, that’s kind of incredible. Why don’t I show it?” That’s just a very basic thing, one really strong thing I took. Were there skills you learned at the Lab that you took to the experience of directing your film on set? Funny enough, everyone seemed to recognize that I needed more advice about the movie business. While there may have been somebody else over on the other side who needed help with his character motivation and script, I was standing there with a pretty okay script and just needed someone to give me lessons in how to protect what I had. It was more like, “Okay. Here’s what’s going to happen. There are going to be all these people who want to suck your blood, and here’s how to protect yourself.” What they were trying to teach me at the Lab, which I was probably too silly to listen to, is that only 50 percent of my job was to write and direct good movies. The other 50 percent was dealing with people who pay for movies and dealing with the distribution process. Once you got the money in place, where did you shoot the film, and what was the post-production process like? We shot in Reno, Nevada, for twenty-eight days, and then went through a hellish process of editing it and trying to regain it back from the company that paid for it. In other words, everything that they had warned me might happen in Hollywood happened. I’ll just say that some people who paid for the movie accidentally forgot to read the script, and when they got the movie that was the script, they were… mad. If you’re a first-time filmmaker, and you’ve got someone to give you the money, you’re going to take it. Even if it smells fishy, you’re going to take it. Don’t. It’s better not to make your movie. You will get it eventually. If it smells fishy, don’t fucking get involved. Did you have people in mind when you were writing Boogie Nights ? Again, I had written it for specific actors—John C. Reilly, Phil Hoffman, Philip Baker Hall, Bob Ridgely, Melora Walters. All those people were in Hard Eight . I like working with the same people. And Julianne Moore is someone that I didn’t know personally, but I knew her work, and so I wrote the part for her. What cinematic influences informed Boogie Nights ? Certainly I think the top three influences, in alphabetical order, are Altman, Scorsese, and Truffaut. They were people that I admired and loved. Jonathan Demme is probably my all-time king hero because he’s the combination of those three, I think. What do you think about when you think about the future? I met Francis Ford Coppola, and he shook my hand and said, “You’re the only one right now.” He said, “There’s always one time in your life where you get to know that you can make one more movie. You have it. You’ll never have it again.” What do you want to make next? I have a movie in my head, in pieces. I have been writing it for a while. It’s basically for a lot of the same actors. Do you have a stock company that you would like to continue working with? Yeah. The goal is to buy the entire Laurel Canyon area and turn it into a backlot for me and my actors. With a monorail from here to Houdini’s house. Was this all part of your plan, years ago when you thought about what you wanted to do with your life? It’s all happening. Well, it’s about a year behind schedule. When you were a teenager, you were planning— Even before that. Six or seven. Six or seven? Yeah. And the presidency’s mine in 2004. Do you want to be a director that inhabits all genres? For example, Scorsese, who’s done almost everything —is that something that appeals to you? Absolutely. I want to make a western. I like it all, and I want to tackle it all. There’s so much I want to do. There’s just not enough fuckin’ time!

THE CAREER OF PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON IN FIVE SHOTS

“In his first feature, Anderson’s use of Steadicam already exploits the dramatic qualities of cinematography, juxtaposing Sydney’s dynamic movement against other gamblers seated like zombies at their slots and screens. The camera whips to a side-angle view of Sydney, tracking him laterally; in doing so it seems to pass through walls of ordinary gamblers. It then opens into a wider view of the floor, a panorama of light and sound, both realistic and expressive. No other shots are as flashy as this one in Hard Eight, a fairly low-key drama led by a reserved, even inscrutable lead performance. But Anderson allows this one shot to give a glimpse into Sydney’s subjective experience, the thrill of walking the casino floor. It’s a precocious display of character development achieved purely through camera movement and staging. The camera revels in this sensory landscape and simultaneously transcends it, as Sydney advances to his rightful place at the head of the craps table.” — Kevin B. Lee

  The Sundance Kid is the first installment of The Directors Series ’ examination into the films and careers of director Paul Thomas Anderson, covering his lo-fi origins and his breakout at the Sundance Film Festival. This video essay was written, edited, and narrated by Cameron Beyl .

  Screenwriter must-read: Paul Thomas Anderson’s screenplay for Hard Eight , originally titled Sydney [ PDF ]. (NOTE: For educational and research purposes only ). The DVD of the film is available at Amazon and other online retailers. Absolutely our highest recommendation.

  The way you look, I think you know what I’m sayin’, old-timer, I think you do. Jesus Christ, why don’t you have some fun? Fun! Fun! Hahahahaha.

In loving memory of Philip Baker Hall (September 10, 1931—June 12, 2022)

  Here are several photos taken behind-the-scenes during production of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Hard Eight . Photographed by Mark Tillie © Green Parrot, Rysher Entertainment, Trinity Distributors, Goldwyn Films, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). Intended for editorial use only. All material for educational and noncommercial purposes only.

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Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews

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• Post author: eenableadmin
• Post published: August 5, 2019
• Post category: Uncategorized

(director/writer: Paul Thomas Anderson; cinematographer: Robert Elswit; editor: Barbara Tulliver; cast: Philip Baker Hall (Sydney), John C. Reilly (John), Samuel L. Jackson (Jimmy), Gwyneth Paltrow (Clementine); Runtime: 101; Entertainment/Rysher/Green Parrot; 1997) “In many ways this film reminds me of Melville’s wonderful film, Bob The Gambler. “

Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

There are many stories that can be told in Las Vegas about those who go there to chase their dreams. This one has a reflective mood that gives its lonely characters a chance to either grow as the story develops or for them to become clearer about who they are and what they are doing.

We can see Vegas at night (or is it day), with its bright lights, as we scrutinize those on the low end of the gambling hierarchy scratch out a living in this casino town. Las Vegas can arguably be America’s alter ego, even if that city is a sharp contrast from what the rest of the country is like. But it does offer a lure for foreign and American visitors to see how the free-wheeling, capitalist country they imagine America to be, operates when it lets its puritanical hair down.

In many ways this film reminds me of Melville’s wonderful film, Bob The Gambler , as the old pro, with style and old-world charm, Sydney (Hall), teaches the young neophyte gambler, John (Reilly), how to eke out a living from gambling. How to do it smartly, with class. It only differs from Melville’s film in the violence that ensues. Hard Eight moves reluctantly into noir film dimensions where the bombardment of bright neon from the swank casinos can’t hide the darkness present in the characters’ hearts, whose dreams have been poisoned and compromised by the dire circumstances they find themselves in. While Melville’s film retains an almost unbelievable lightness. This is not so for first time director, Anderson. He revels in the nuances of his protagonists, with a need for them to be respected and thought of as tough-minded, prepared to go as far as killing someone in order for them to protect what they consider valuable.

Sydney treats John to a coffee and a smoke in a diner, after Sydney finds John sitting slumped down and unkempt in front of the diner. He offers to help him out, no strings attached, if John will just tell him his troubles. John says he needs $6,000 to pay for his mother’s funeral. The conversation between the two is guarded and minimal, and we are left to wonder why this older, sophisticated, seasoned gambling pro, would want to help out this youngster as a father/son relationship begins to develop. The answer comes toward the end of the film, though we never really learn his psychological reasons for doing what he does. So we are left tantalized with this mystery man and his impeccable manners, wondering who he is, realizing that he is not a St. Francis type of savior but probably some kind of wise guy mentor who seems to have a certain worldly wisdom that he can dispense to someone who is willing to trust and follow him.

The two of them head for Vegas in Sydney’s car. Sydney stakes John to some money and teaches him how to gamble small time, a skill he will need to learn if he wishes to stay in Vegas. The dim-witted John operates the casino scam Sydney taught him, which is an actual scam. The casino gets ripped off as John works his $150 into $2,000 worth of credit, and a free room with amenities.

A couple of years go by and John has come to idolize Sydney, as he feels contented with what Sydney has done for him, feeling right at home after moving to Reno. He is attracted to the alluring but dumb cocktail waitress and part-time hooker, Clementine (Gwyneth). Through their conversations and concerns we get a look at what the gambling scene is like without all the glitter, as its small time inhabitants are caught in the dark web the casino’s spin. Jimmy (Jackson) is a friend of John’s, who works security inside for the casinos. He does not impress Sydney as being anything but a sleazy loudmouth and a sure bet for trouble.

The final scenes involve the trouble John and Clementine get into after getting married and how Sydney discretely helps them, while Jimmy plays a part in uncovering Sydney’s past. At last, we find out why Sydney is doing all this for John. The characters make this film happen. It is a good first effort by the director, who has told a tight story and held our interest by taking a fresh approach to tell an old story.

REVIEWED ON 1/8/99 GRADE: B+

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Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

When good luck is a long shot, you have to hedge your bets.

A stranger mentors a young Reno gambler who weds a hooker and befriends a vulgar casino regular.

Philip Baker Hall John C. Reilly Gwyneth Paltrow Samuel L. Jackson F. William Parker Philip Seymour Hoffman Nathanael Cooper Wynn White Robert Ridgely Kathleen Campbell Michael J. Rowe Peter D'Allesandro Steve Blane Xaleese Melora Walters Jean Langer Andy Breen Renee Breen Jane W. Brimmer Mark Finizza Richard Gross Cliff Keeley Carrie McVey Truman Robbins Ernie Anderson Wendy Weidman Jake Cross

Director Director

Paul Thomas Anderson

Producers Producers

Robert Jones John S. Lyons Daniel Lupi Helene Mulholland Craig Markey

Writer Writer

Casting casting.

Christine Sheaks

Editor Editor

Barbara Tulliver

Cinematography Cinematography

Robert Elswit

Assistant Directors Asst. Directors

Rip Murray Toni Whiteman

Executive Producers Exec. Producers

Keith Samples Hans Brockmann François Duplat

Lighting Lighting

Kelly Clear

Camera Operator Camera Operator

Andy Shuttleworth

Production Design Production Design

Nancy Deren

Art Direction Art Direction

Michael Krantz

Set Decoration Set Decoration

David A. Koneff Steve Brennan Tim Cohn Lloyd Brown T.C. Chappelow Martin Milligan

Special Effects Special Effects

Lou Carlucci

Stunts Stunts

Cliff Cudney Bobby Burns

Composers Composers

Jon Brion Michael Penn

Sound Sound

Mark Weingarten Marty Hutcherson John Brasher Richard King Paula Fairfield Carlos Isais Daniel Pellerin Jeffrey R. Payne Todd Beckett Eric Hoeschen Tim O'Connell Doug Reed John Sievert Casey Stone Virginia Storey

Costume Design Costume Design

Mark Bridges

Makeup Makeup

Lydia Milars Alyson Murphy

Hairstyling Hairstyling

Trinity Filmed Entertainment Rysher Entertainment Green Parrot Samuel Goldwyn Company

Releases by Date

15 may 1996, 18 may 1996, 28 feb 1997, 17 oct 1997, 07 apr 2008, 13 aug 2010, 27 jan 1998, 06 jun 2007, releases by country.

• Physical MA 15+
• Premiere Cannes Film Festival
• Physical 16

Switzerland

• Theatrical 18
• Digital 15 DVD - Downgraded from 18
• Theatrical R

102 mins   More at IMDb TMDb Report this page

Popular reviews

Review by Matthew Christman ★★★★ 13

Watching this on the heels of Phantom Thread (PTA's eighth film!) highlights how cleanly you can separate his career into equal Early and Later halves. Both films are shining examples of the early and late Anderson. Hard Eight has emotional man-children reaching out for family, swooping camera moves and zooming close-ups, rich, almost lurid colors, and a Jon Brion score. PTA carried those stylistic and thematic elements with him while making Boogie Nights, Magnolia and Punch Drunk Love. Something happened to PTA between the making of PDL and There Will Be Blood (something that I would like him to open up about at some point), and his last four films contain things that Phantom Thread exemplifies in spades: repressed, emotionally-reticent…

Review by nickusen 1

philip seymour hoffman gives one of the finest & most singular single scene performances ever

Review by PTAbro ★★★½ 19

Let's talk about titles. Hard Eight vs. Sydney . As a lot of people know, Sydney was PTA's chosen title for a film about, well, a guy named Sydney. Fair enough, and admirable in its simplicity. However, this being his first feature, the story goes that, in order for greater control over the final cut, PTA compromised on the title, allowing the film to be released as Hard Eight . I'd certainly not argue that making a film is much like having a baby, and being forced to compromise any aspect of it is akin to having the hospital get naming rights of your child. But, sometimes good things come out of bad situations, and not only did we get a better…

Review by Casey Malone ★★★★ 2

I just learned that Paul Thomas Anderson was 24 when he made this and almost gave it one star out of spite.

Review by SilentDawn ★★★★ 4

This is the start. The start of one of the greatest track-records of any filmmaker. The absolute visionary and master who is Paul Thomas Anderson. Many cite Hard Eight (Sydney) as PTA's weakest film, and I have to disagree. Hard Eight may be more low key, less flashy and solemn in tone; but the layers of dread, mystery and danger make this one of Paul Thomas Anderson's finest achievements.

The Awesome: Phillip Baker Hall. This is his movie. Sure, he was great in Magnolia; but he is the star of the show here. Cold, calculating and charming; the viewer never knows what this character is up to. Until the very end. Another charm of Hard Eight is that it's the…

Review by matt lynch ★★★½

there's already a real voice here, a richness of idiosyncracy, achy & showy, eager to impress. trying to pull his shit together.

Review by Ryan Francis ★★★★½ 3

An exceptional debut from a filmmaker who was clearly a master of the art from the very beginning.

Review by Josh Lewis ★★★★

Never ignore a man's courtesy.

Review by Evan ★★★★ 7

A great first feature film from who is one of the best director's of all-time. Before seeing John C. Reilly in Magnolia , I honestly never knew he could really act. He was damn good in this film too.

Review by san ★★★½

SHAKA-LAKKA- DOO SHAKA-LAKKA- DOOBEY-DOOBEY-DOO

Review by fran hoepfner ★★★½ 2

ok now I’ve seen them all. Philip Baker Hall runs away with this, duh. I was gonna write something pithy like “they don’t make movies that are just about, like, a guy anymore,” but then I remembered Mank. I love Gwyneth’s late 90s run!

Review by Matt Singer ★★★½

Man, Samuel L. Jackson and Paul Thomas Anderson really need to make another movie together. (Ditto for John C. Reilly, come to think of it, even if he did have a cameo in Licorice Pizza .)

This holds up pretty well, even if it does feel more like a collection of David Mamet and Scorsese quotations than it did when it came out (mostly because in 1996, I hadn’t seen much Mamet or Scorsese). The opening sequence is still the best, with the great Philip Baker Hall taking Reilly under his wing and showing him the difference between playing a casino and playing at a casino. I wonder what would happen if you tried that scam in Reno in 2022...

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Hard Eight (1996)

★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - A black and blue semi-trailer truck passes by a coffee shop whose exterior lights are askew, and a man in a dark overcoat waits for the truck to pass, pauses for a moment more, then crosses the road towards coffee. Outside the diner a young man sits on the ground, bedraggled and bestubbled, knees up, arms crossed and looking despondent...

Neo-Noir Crime | 102 Minutes | 1996 | United States

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson | Producers: Robert Jones, John Lyons | Writer: Paul Thomas Anderson | Starring: Philip Baker Hall, John C. Reilly, Gwyneth Paltrow, Samuel L. Jackson, Philip Seymour Hoffman | Music: Jon Brion, Michael Penn | Cinematography: Robert Elswit | Editor: Barbara Tulliver

A black and blue semi-trailer truck passes by a coffee shop whose exterior lights are askew, and a man in a dark overcoat waits for the truck to pass, pauses for a moment more, then crosses the road towards coffee. Outside the diner a young man sits on the ground, bedraggled and bestubbled, knees up, arms crossed and looking despondent. With a gruff voice and sharp diction, the older man invites the younger inside for a drink and a cigarette. We get our first look at his face, weathered but well put together, neat and somewhere in his late fifties or early sixties. After learning that the young man is struggling for the $6,000 it will take to bury his mother, the older man, Sydney (Philip Baker Hall), proposes that John (John C. Reilly) accompany him to Las Vegas.

Two years later, his bills paid but still waifish when it comes to gambling, John continues to defer to Sydney in matters of etiquette and follows him to the same casinos and other haunts, but he is starting to test his independence, to find new friends and manners. They’re based in Reno, and Sydney takes on another stray in the form of Clementine (Gwyneth Paltrow), a cocktail waitress, an ingénue or something harder. Is Sydney helping these two out of the kindness of his heart? Perhaps we get a clue when he reveals to Clementine that he has children who he has not spoken to in years, an adult son and a slightly older daughter: perhaps Sydney is looking for a surrogate family, but a clue is all we can muster. Sydney brings John and Clementine together. But out of his hands, things go awry, and when John and Clementine opt to take one of her other ‘Johns’ hostage over an unpaid $300, the trio must scramble to beat the threats of police, prison, and blackmail.

Hard Eight , a neo-noir crime drama, was the first feature directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, who had to wrest back control of the final cut using the impending success of Boogie Nights as leverage. Originally titled ‘Sydney’, it expanded on the acclaimed short Cigarettes & Coffee , which also stars Philip Baker Hall, and set in a diner, sees various couples unfold the tumultuous journey of a twenty-dollar note with a name scrawled upon it.

In contrast to the earlier short, Hard Eight remains elliptical in terms of plot, but less laden and more natural when it comes to dialogue. It stands as a taut and enveloping character study, a hard-edged yet rhythmic mood piece, an ostensible thriller in which for half of its run-time, everything goes more or less swimmingly, the only tension emanating from Sydney’s steely self-possession and the lingering lack of tension. It focuses intently on its four characters, Sydney, John, Clementine, and Jimmy (Samuel L. Jackson), a gambling friend of John’s who seems amiable enough but thinks he can pierce the cool old-school ambiance, with a star turn at the midpoint from Philip Seymour Hoffman as a brash young craps player, who provides a spark of energy which functions as both portent and climax.

Philip Baker Hall as Sydney is captivating for so much of the film precisely for his mixture of forthrightness and inscrutability, which gives way so seamlessly later on to displays of genuine fear and openhearted emotion. We are surprised when, after John and Clementine take their leave and he disposes of some crucial pieces of evidence, the first thing that he does is watch their wedding video, but it is an expansion rather than a modification of character, his mode of steady contemplation shown as a way of processing great depths of feeling more than a necessity for cold calculation. We are used, too, to Sydney providing the film with its kinetic energy: he tells people what to do and where to go, and the camera follows him, but suddenly we face him as he sits, each of us waiting, and we find that his hardness matches his capacity for sentiment.

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• Professional gambler Sydney teaches John the tricks of the trade. John does well until he falls for cocktail waitress Clementine.
• John has lost all his money. He sits outside a diner in the desert when Sydney happens along, buys him coffee, then takes him to Reno and shows him how to get a free room without losing much money. Under Sydney's fatherly tutelage, John becomes a successful small-time professional gambler, and all is well, until he falls for Clementine, a cocktail waitress and sometimes hooker. — Jon Reeves <[email protected]>
• Sydney is a veteran gambler in his sixties who still spends his time at the casinos. When he meets John, a loser with no money at all, he sees him as a son and tries to help him. He takes care of him and teaches him all the tricks of his work. He also helps him to make a relationship with Clementine, a young girl who works at the casino as a waitress. John doesn't seem to be bothered by the fact that Clementine is also a hooker, but soon something happens that turns their lives upside down. — Chris Makrozahopoulos <[email protected]>
• John (John C. Reilly) is a down-and-out gambler who lost all his money gambling at Las Vegas. The first time he appears, he's sitting outside a diner and Sydney (Philip Baker Hall) sees him. Sydney offers to help John learn how to navigate the Las Vegas world. This means placing small bets, establishing himself and getting 'comped' for a room at the casino. Life at the casino is good for John and Sydney. While staying there, they meet two people who become important to the film: Jimmy (Samuel L. Jackson) is a small-time player in the Las Vegas scene and Clementine (Gwyneth Paltrow), a full-time cocktail waitress and a part-time hooker. Sydney takes Clementine under his wing just like he did John. John and Clementine get married and when Clementine has sex with a visitor to Vegas (F. William Parker) who refuses to pay, John angrily kidnaps and attacks him. John telephones Sydney to come over and help straighten things out. When Sydney gets to the motel where John and Clementine are holding the hostage, Sydney removes evidence that they were there and tells the newlyweds to go away. They leave headed for Niagara Falls. Jimmy then enters and tries to blackmail Sydney with the knowledge that Sydney killed John's father. It seems that Sydney meeting and helping John wasn't an accident after all. The title comes from lingo used by gamblers while playing Craps. Rolling a seven with two dice is the most likely result. Eight and Six are the second most frequently rolled totals with two dice. In order to increase the payout for these number combinations, a bet can be made that requires a pair of threes for a 'Hard Six' or a pair of fours for a 'Hard Eight'. Early in the film Philip Seymour Hoffman loses while playing for a 'Hard Eight'. Later in the film Jimmy gambles for a 'Hard Eight' and wins. At the end of the film Jimmy's luck runs out. While celebrating his 'Hard Eight' victory, Sydney ties up the loose ends by killing Jimmy.

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Originally titled Sydney, it was Anderson's first feature film and the expansion of the short film Cigarettes & Coffee. The main character Sydney was named after Hall's previous role in Midnight Run . Hall, Walters, Reilly and Hoffman later appeared in Boogie Nights and Magnolia .

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Paul Thomas Anderson — Top Rated Movies

Critique: 9

Movies like Hard Eight remind me of what original, compelling characters the movies can sometimes give us.

Hard Eight wouldn’t be the compelling story it is without Philip Baker Hall as its center of gravity and values. Anderson wrote the script wi...

Gamblers live for the moment – for the next bet, the one that will take them over the top – and this gilt-edged noir contraption is an en...

Hard Eight’s narrative gears turn with the slow, sure precision of an observatory clock.

It’s done with such intelligence and feeling, and such a brilliant cast, that it grips our attention from first shuffle to last bet.

There’s something almost hypnotic about the way Hard Eight develops – even in its slowest, most tedious moments, it keeps our attention.

Noirish thrillers live or die by their plot twists and dialogue… Unfortunately, the script by first-time filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson fails on bo...

This first feature by writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson is impressive for its lean and unblemished storytelling, but even more so for its perfor...

Just a soupcon of livelier drama would have improved the proceedings considerably.

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Hard Truths

Cast & crew.

Marianne Jean-Baptiste

Michele Austin

David Webber

Tuwaine Barrett

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‘hard truths’ review: marianne jean-baptiste delivers a virtuosic turn in mike leigh’s searing study of a woman at war with the world.

The actress reunites with her 'Secrets & Lies' director, playing a woman whose anger issues alienate her from her family.

By Jon Frosch

Senior Editor, Reviews

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In the pantheon of unpleasant screen heroines, Pansy Deacon more than holds her own. Played by a ferocious Marianne Jean-Baptiste, the perpetually harried and hostile protagonist of Mike Leigh ’s Hard Truths spews her venom on everyone she encounters — from family members to furniture store employees, and all manner of unlucky folks in between.

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Spending time with Pansy as she seethes and suffers, berates and bullies, is by turns exhausting, bitterly funny and, in flickers, illuminating. Whether her bark is worse than her bite is up for debate, but part of the film’s provocative humanistic resonance is its insistence that meanness is spawned from hurt, and, as such, is worthy of compassion.  

Questions of congeniality aside, it’s nice to find the filmmaker back on contemporary ground after Mr. Turner and Peterloo , two consecutive forays into 19th-century English history. Hard Truths isn’t top-tier Mike Leigh — it’s tidier, more schematic, less expansive than his best. But this is nevertheless a vivid, superbly acted and directed portrait of psychic pain and its collateral wreckage, filled out with lashes of humor and tiny brush strokes of tenderness.

Here, race is an additional, largely subtextual element — nodded at, not dwelled on, as a possible factor in Pansy’s anguish. And while some may bristle at a white director delving into the dysfunction of a British Jamaican family, the filmmaker avoids obvious pitfalls by playing it straight; Hard Truths doesn’t have the farcical edge of Leigh’s earlier domestic dramedies like Life Is Sweet , or the pity-the-poor-wretches undercurrent of condescension that nagged at All or Nothing . It’s the work of someone who, at 81, is still seeking out new ways to explore the world and the fascinating, frustrating people who populate it.

When Pansy ventures outside, she’s at war with the world. As staged by Leigh and played by Jean-Baptiste, run-ins with fellow customers at the supermarket, with a sofa saleswoman, with a doctor and a dentist become mini tour de forces of rage and bad-faith defensiveness. Pansy’s viciousness is comical, her insults possessing a florid, almost literary quality: The aforementioned doctor is “a mouse with glasses squeaking at me”; a long-necked woman who dares stand up to Pansy is an “ostrich” and, moments later, “a piece of string.” But her temper is also scary, an explosive manifestation of pathologies both psychological (depression, anxiety, OCD) and physical (migraines, jaw pain, intestinal troubles).

Just when you think you may not be able to take much more of Pansy’s haranguing or Curtis and Moses’ moping — read: 15 minutes into the film — Leigh introduces another key character: Pansy’s younger sister Chantelle (the wonderful Michele Austin), a hairdresser as warm and good-natured as Pansy is scornful and snappish. Scenes of Chantelle doing braids while presiding over gossipy salon chit-chat about dates and diets, dreams and work shifts, are a delicious antidote to Pansy’s tirades, tempering the story’s dourness with much-needed humor and light.

Leigh also offers glimpses into Chantelle’s day-to-day as a single mom to two bright, vivacious grown daughters, Aleisha (Sophia Brown) and Kayla (Ani Nelson). The tight-knit trio share a small apartment that’s as lived-in as Pansy’s spacious home is sterile. Their teasing joviality and zest make for an even more — perhaps overly — pointed contrast to the moroseness of Pansy’s household.

The thematic framework of Hard Truths is, as in many Leigh films, legible verging on obvious. “Why can’t you enjoy life?” Chantelle asks Pansy at one point. “I don’t know!” the latter thunders back, and though Leigh never purports to have a definitive explanation, a graveside scene in the second half of the film unlocks bits of revealing backstory and insight. Echoing Secrets & Lies , things come to a head at an ostensibly celebratory meal — here, a Mother’s Day lunch at Chantelle’s home, where these characters’ wounds are exposed as well as their touchingly stubborn refusal to give up on one another.

Pansy and Chantal are so clearly where Leigh’s interest lies that the film’s secondary figures can’t help but feel thin by comparison. Curtley, in particular, isn’t fleshed-out convincingly: He’s a victim of Pansy’s ire, but also a cause of it, and that duality comes across less as complex than unclear. Meanwhile, peeks at Aleisha and Kayla’s professional lives — each gets an obligatory workplace scene — are perfunctory at best. Hard Truths sometimes seems uncertain of whether it wants to be a tightly focused character study or display a broader tapestry of lives.

Such shortcomings are hardly dealbreakers in a film that otherwise fits like a small but crucial piece in the greater puzzle of its maker’s career. That sense of belonging is bolstered by fine contributions from regular Leigh collaborators, including DP Dick Pope’s searching facial close-ups and Gary Yershon’s orchestral score, oscillating between mournful strings and bittersweet notes of optimism.

If the matter of why Pansy’s family puts up with her haunts Hard Truths like an unsolved mystery, Leigh allows glimmers of an answer by the time the film draws to a close: Pansy may be a nightmare, but in her howling, despondent way she’s also a life force. And in Jean-Baptiste’s brilliant turn, one detects the possibility — remote, yet distinct — that beneath all this woman’s fierceness and fury is a kind of fierce, furious love.

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