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To some, however, $100 bets are chump change. Especially when the money isn’t yours.
Owning Mahowney is the true story of Dan Mahowney (the great Phillip Seymour Hoffman), the youngest Vice President in his bank’s history, managing multi-million accounts. He has the utmost respect of his peers. However, he’s harboring a pretty dark secret. He’s addicted to high-stakes gambling. Soon, he’s embezzling money from the bank to feed his habit, leaving work every night and flying from his home in Toronto to Atlantic City, New Jersey, to gamble hundreds of thousands of dollars. Not only is he ruining his professional life, he’s also ruining his home life, abandoning his sweet-as-pie girlfriend, Belinda (Minnie Driver), for gambling whenever humanly possible. The stakes continue to get higher and higher, as his habit of gambling and his new habit of embezzling grows beyond boundaries.
I am beginning to wonder if there’s anything Hoffman can’t do. His embodiment of characters is rare. As much of a treat it is to see him on screen, within minutes, you have completely forgotten that you are watching him. He is his character, and that must be torture for him. I wouldn’t want to embody Dan Mahowney, a man so completely devoured by gambling that he can’t even function at work or at home. At work, he’s calling in bets for sporting events. At home, he’s obsessing over line scores to the point where he can’t even concentrate on anything else. He chooses to not sleep so that he can gamble. His routine of getting off of work, flying to Atlantic City, gambling until 6:00 am, boarding a plane and going right back to work, cashing other people’s checks and doing it all over again, is simply mind-boggling. Rinse and Repeat. And his treatment of Belinda is horrible. One heartbreaking scene has Dan and Belinda taking a weekend trip to Las Vegas for some valuable time as a couple, only to have Dan desert Belinda while she’s showering in order to gamble. Hours later, she tracks him down at the craps table, racking up the chips and he dismisses her to gamble some more.
What’s more heartbreaking is what I didn’t know about gambling addiction. Addicts don’t appear to be any different than alcohol or drug addicts. The obsession and the fear, the depression and the pain, it’s no different. Watching Hoffman on his knees in the hotel bathroom with his head against the sink in utter misery while Belinda is in the other room, unknowing of his addiction and thinking that he just enjoys gaming, is pretty cold. Hoffman couldn’t be better in this role, as is Driver.
Also great is John Hurt as the vile, powerful casino owner, Victor Foss. The more money that Dan brings to the casino, the more Foss loves him. Foss does everything he can to keep Dan gambling, even hiring a personal assistant for Dan so that he never has to leave the tables. He is the most evil of vampires.
But the true star of this film was tension. Tension follows Dan like his shadow. It’s especially prevalent at the tables, watching his winnings grow to the million-dollar range, only for tension to step in and distract him, causing the winnings to plummet and eventually disappear. Dan sits at the table in a strange mixture of sadness and harmony, as if his goal was to win it all and turn around and lose it. Tension pats him on the back as if it was a job well done.
This film is beautifully brutal. The rise and fall of Dan Mahowney is a sad one, to say the least, but it’s definitely one to be seen.
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