MOVIE REVIEW : ‘The Music of Chance’: Bracing and Austere

Jim Nashe (Mandy Patinkin), a Boston fireman, has been aimlessly riding the open road in his BMW ever since he quit his job after his wife walked out on him and his young daughter, and his father bequeathed him a $200,000 inheritance.

That inheritance, more than a year later, has dwindled to about $20,000, which Nashe keeps in an envelope crammed inside the glove compartment.

When he picks up Jack Pozzi (James Spader), a poker whiz on his way to a high-stakes game, Nashe casually, methodically calculates a way to replenish his pile. Pozzi was recently rousted out of a high-stakes haul--that’s why Nashe finds him on the roadside battered and drifting. He’ll stake the kid to a game with a pushover pair of lottery-winning millionaire housemates (Charles Durning and Joel Grey) and split the winnings 50-50.

Paul Auster’s 1990 novel “The Music of Chance,� directed and co-scripted by Philip Haas, has made its move to the screen with its low-key creepiness intact. The sense of impending matter-of-fact doom, in both book and film, seems to issue from a place beyond fear and loathing. Nashe, who moves through his fate with an almost bemused calm, is a new-style zombie: a post-depressive man of feeling who has lost all feeling for life. He’s very good at going through the motions, but there’s a blankness to his beneficence with Pozzi; he just wants to keep moving and Pozzi is his passport to a winged oblivion.

What’s unsettling about the film of “The Music of Chance� (at the Laemmle’s Sunset 5 and Goldwyn Pavilion Cinemas) is that its maniacal view is kept rigorous and orderly.

The limitation of the film (and book) is that this material is a form of bluff--like a poker hand that impends more than it delivers. The metaphysics of chance are tricked up into a kind of higher-priced “Twilight Zone� episode. Probably the best way to enjoy “The Music of Chance� (rated R for language) is to clear away the latticework of Lit 1-A symbology and just enter into the moody meaningful nothingness of it all. That’s what Patinkin appears to have done; he has the right benumbed alertness in the role, balancing out Spader who seems miscast as a sleazy scrounger. (He’s better at playing sleek sleazoids.)

The nothingness sets in once Nashe and Pozzi play out their hand with their Laurel and Hardy-like hosts in a baronial, isolated Pennsylvania estate. Durning’s Bill Flower has the bullying girth of a man whose poundage equals power; his rail-thin partner, Grey’s Willie Stone, is an insinuating creepo who is constructing a vast miniature tract--he calls it City of the World--complete with models and stick figures of every important person and happening in his life.

The latest joint project of Flower and Stone is the building of a vast wall on the far reaches of their property consisting entirely of 10,000 stones from the wreckage of a 15th-Century Irish castle. The film is about what happens to Nashe and Pozzi when their luck turns and they are maneuvered into carrying out the Sisyphean task.

Their overseer, played by the mumbly and menacing M. Emmet Walsh, is a drawling change of pace for the two losers. He provides only the tiniest of amenities, like a miniature red wagon to haul the stones. Nashe accepts his enforcement with aplomb--it’s the fate he knew he was heading for all along. Pozzi isn’t quite so accommodating; he has fewer resources to occupy the hours. (He has the vacuousness of a man devoted entirely to luck whose luck has run out.) The two men work up a mild jail-cell camaraderie, but there are no deepening emotional linkages, nothing to suggest that these two are bonded for life--brothers in chains. The film doesn’t indulge in that kind of sentiment.

It doesn’t indulge in any sentiment, really, and the austerity is bracing. At least until you realize that what you see is what you get. “The Music of Chance� never cracks its poker face.

‘The Music of Chance’

James Spader: Jack Pozzi

Mandy Patinkin: James Nashe

Charles Durning: Bill Flowers

Joel Grey: Willie Stone

An I.R.S./Trans Atlantic and American Playhouse Theatrical Films presentation of a Frederick Zollo production. Director Philip Haas. Producers Frederick Zollo and Dylan Sellars. Executive producers Miles Copeland III, Paul Colichman and Lindsay Law. Screenplay by Philip Haas and Belinda Haas, based on the novel by Paul Auster. Cinematographer Bernard Zitzermann. Editor Belinda Haas. Costumes Rudy Dillon. Music Phillip Johnston. Production design Hugo Luczyc-Wyhowski. Art director Ruth Ammon. Set decorator Christina Belt. Running time: 1 hour, 49 minutes.

MPAA-rated R (language).