Croupier: Spotlight on Clive Owen
Screening: Fri. Oct 9th, 2009 @ 7:00 PM - Smith Rafael Film Center, San Rafael, CA
 Please join us for the Spotlight Tribute program of clips and conversation with Clive Owen, followed by a screening of Croupier and the presentation of the MVFF award. Directly after the program is the not-to-be-missed reception at Tiburon’s hottest new restaurant, Tiburon Grill, featuring wine, cocktails and delicious contemporary cuisine.
Croupier: Clive Owen plays down-and-out writer-turned–casino croupier Jack Manfred in a rare screening of this potent neo-noir thriller. When the usually straight-edged Jack is charmed by a gambler and her casino heist plans, luck may (or may not) be a lady.
Since gliding casually and strikingly onto cinema’s international stage as Mike Hodges’ cool-eyed but restive Croupier (1998), Clive Owen has reveled in risk, taking chances as an actor most “punters” (to use the film’s Britishism for gamblers) would balk at. Now a legit Hollywood leading man, opposite the likes of Julia Roberts and Cate Blanchett, Owen retains a restless charm behind his half-stoic, half-mischievous good looks. His specialty, across an impressive spectrum of roles, isn’t loners so much as outside-insiders: men with entrée into a private or underground world, but whose connection churns with an almost offhanded, ultimately profound ambivalence. Before his croupier, he was Bent’s Weimar-era bon vivant, Max, a spirited scion slumming it among the limit-pushing cabaret world, suddenly cast into the nightmare of Nazi persecution as a homosexual; later, Children of Men’s disillusioned revolutionary, pressured into one last fantastic mission on behalf of humanity; and even Walter Raleigh, charismatic pirate and darling of England’s rising imperial court under its captivating figurehead, in Elizabeth: The Golden Age. That vitality and individuality are on display again in Scott Hicks’s The Boys Are Back, where Owen delivers a magnetic performance as a widower father trading growing pains with two boys. The happy loner making unexpected contact, reaching for some undeniable connection, Clive Owen is at once an irresistible puzzle and our ready ally on the big screen.
–Robert Avila
Total Program:
139 Minutes
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