I can still recall the posters for Hard Eight going up in the tube and a certain buzz about the film which put it on my radar although I never got round to watching it. No-one knew at the time that this was the first offering of one of the modern masters of the art. There’s something quite affecting about watching Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s cameo appearance, which is so distinctive and at the same time so unlike Hoffman, because of the youthfulness, the cockiness of his performance, which looking back retrospectively almost makes it look as though he was cast against type. The film is full of future stars, not the least of them Gwyneth Paltrow who gives a performance which suggests the potential of a greater actress than the media personality she has subsequently become, capable of portraying an erratic emotional instability. Not to mention Samuel L Jackson, even if he had already broken through with Pulp Fiction. Hard Eight revealed Anderson to be a director who knew how to get the best out of his actors, also including Philip Baker Hall and John C Reilly, how to make the most of their tics and mannerisms. The film is essentially a character study, with the narrative rather less consequential than it initially purports to be. A sub-Mamet movie which in the end out-Mameted Mamet, by somehow ignoring the intricacies of the gambling world, using it as a backdrop rather than a focal point. The film hinges on a just about credible sequence of events which feel, nevertheless, contrived. As though the writer-director is giving a nod in the direction of narrative, but is more interested in tone and ‘clima’, the mood of a man walking through a Vegas gambling parlour of more importance than anything he actually does there. There’s already something stately about Anderson’s filmmaking, hinting at the more operatic path he would soon follow.
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