Taglines: Know when to hold ’em. Know when to fold ’em. The game is on!
Set against the world of high stakes poker, Deal follows the story of Tommy Vinson, an ex-gambler who quit the game of Texas Hold’em over 30 years ago after missing a family emergency and swearing to his wife, Helen, “never again”. Tommy tries to be content with his luggage business but while watching a poker tournament on television, he sees someone who reminds him of his younger self, Alex Stillman.
Alex is a cocky, hotshot card playing senior at Yale University. He is the best player there. Alex’s parents would like him to go to law school, but Alex only dreams of playing professional poker, like the icons he sees on TV. After winning an on-line event that places him in the televised game, Alex loses early. He’s close to greatness, but what he doesn’t realize yet is that he focuses too much on the cards, and not the players… that’s where Tommy comes in.
Tommy finds Alex and makes a pact with him: he’ll front Alex the high priced entry fees to all the major tournaments if Alex plays the way that Tommy wants him to. Alex resists at first, but after seeing Tommy make some impressive calls while watching a poker game together, Alex changes his mind and they partner.
Alex’s parents are sick about it, and Helen, Tommy’s wife, is concerned that her husband will get sucked back into the game that took him away once before. Tommy promises Helen that this will not happen because he’s not the one playing, Alex is. But after Tommy and Alex have a falling out over a local Las Vegas call girl that Tommy arranged to meet Alex and whom Alex has developed feelings for, things change, and everything is off.
The Shuffle: The Characters and Story
Poker can be a friendly game when played among friends for pocket change. However, as it has moved from the realm of basements and backrooms to the forefront of American entertainment, its underlying requirements of every-man-for-himself play and intense mental prowess have become more and more exposed. Luck is just a small part of making it big in high-stakes poker. Cards are important, but so is reading your opponent, getting the upper hand, and remaining cool no matter what lands on the table.
In the vast and impressive career that has established him as a pillar of American cinema, Burt Reynolds has mastered many roles that define the mythology of the American man. He’s been the truck-driving cowboy in Smokey and the Bandit, the smart prison inmate in The Longest Yard, the sly racecar driver in The Cannonball Run, and even the porn impresario in Boogie Nights. In Deal, Reynolds expertly takes on poker’s high stakes and adds to his iconic roles as Tommy Vinson, another unshakable, quintessential, American male.
Tommy is edging towards retirement. He lives in the suburbs in a comfortable house. He has a wonderful wife, whom he loves dearly, and a best friend who has been by his side for years. Yet it’s not enough: he longs for more. But unlike many men who search for nameless excitement, or wish they had taken the path less traveled, Tommy knows exactly what he’s missing and exactly how he lost it.
He was part of poker’s inner-circle when the game belonged to a small group of elite players, and he became legendary for a few of his amazing wins. But after losing his confidence, he began to lose his money; then the losing trailed him at every table. “Tommy had to quit the game,” Deal director and co-writer Gil Cates, Jr. explains. “He lost his house, his money, and he hurt his relationship with his wife. He went down in flames with his cards.” The final straw came when his wife delivered an ultimatum: cards or their marriage. For Tommy, the choice was easy.
“He gave up gambling for my character,” says accomplished stage and screen actress Maria Mason, who plays Tommy’s wife, Helen. “They have a really stable and happy marriage. They have the friendship, the commitment, and the passion.”
Often conveyed through Reynolds’ strong silences and well-honed stares, Tommy is a man who is too strong for resentment of his wife or the world. He feels confident he made the right choice, but as he sees Texas Hold’em rise in popularity and profits, he continues to want the pride, esteem, and jackpot that he could have captured. While Tommy watches Hold’em from his couch, a new, young player catches his eye. Alex Stillman has just participated in his first major televised event and, by watching his style of play, Tommy sees a player strong in brains, talent, and mathematical skill, but lacking the experience and people-reading skills that are required to be a winner at the world’s big tables.
“Alex is great with numbers and great at cards, but he always plays the cards,” Cates, Jr. says. “He doesn’t realize it’s way more than that. You’ve got to play the people you’re playing against. Tommy knows this.”
In Alex, Deal explores the flip-side of the American male. The young man is on the verge of anything and everything; he is talented but inexperienced, driven but tentative, cocky but insecure. Having brought to life this generation’s masculine humor, anxiety, and confusion in projects such as TV’s The Loop and Reaper, Bret Harrison easily becomes Alex, embodying his sense of excitement and love of the game. “Alex just graduated from college and he’s trying to figure out what to do with his life,” Harrison explains. “His dad wants him to be a lawyer and go work for him, but he has this very strong interest in poker.”
Alex’s fate could be to fade into the background of the competitive poker scene as a kid who showed early promise but couldn’t deliver; who had a chance but took the safe road of a nine-to-five job. Tommy could easily move into his later years watching his poker peers rake in money and respect from the game he loves. However, an encounter between the two at a local casino ensures neither will settle for such simple lives.
“You have a talented kid who has raw material,” executive producer Michael Arata says. “Then you have an experienced veteran who sees the raw material and, while he had the opportunity to be the great one, either missed it or didn’t take it because of his own reasons.” This juxtaposition and how these seemingly opposite characters come together at and away from the tables produces the film’s most surprising and interesting moments.
“Deal is really about these two people—one younger and one older—who go through changes and how they affect each other,” Cates, Jr. synopsizes. On their journey across the top tables of the U.S., they encounter some of the best players in the world—many of whom are played by themselves in the film—along with Michelle, a young woman in Las Vegas whom Alex falls for. Played by the talented and beautiful Shannon Elizabeth, Michelle’s hold over Alex influences his playing and his relationship with Tommy.
“As all young kids do, we see in Alex the opportunity to have individualism,” Arata says. “He wants to be himself and he doesn’t necessarily want to be guided by Tommy. As the story develops, we see their relationship fall apart and, of course, they inevitably have to meet in the end, where they not only face each other’s fears and talents, but we maybe see that Tommy didn’t teach young Alex all the tricks.”
During that inevitable meeting, both characters get to evaluate how good they really are, how far they’ve come, and where they really want to go. For everyone involved in the film, the climactic scenes held a special excitement, but particularly for Reynolds. “In my mind, this character has stopped playing and misses it enormously,” he says. “I’ve been saving, waiting for the moment when they deal the cards to me for the first time in 20 years.” In that moment, Tommy sees his chance to make up for past mistakes, and the question of playing the cards versus playing the players finally gets answered.
The Cards
Though the action at the tables is staged, some of the most compelling elements of Deal—the drama of the game, the different styles of play, and the struggle to read opponents—are taken directly from the growing and changing world of professional poker. Casinos have reported a 370 percent rise in tournament play in recent years, and more frequently at today’s tables the old-style greats sit next to up-and-comers who have learned their craft online and through TV. Though Alex’s story is fiction, as recently as 2006 the World Poker Tour saw its championship go to a 26-year-old player who rose fast through the ranks after taking cues from some of his more seasoned peers.
These players and their exploits have become legendary thanks to the popularity of televised poker tournaments, an element of play that is integral to Deal’s story. “Televised poker definitely influenced the way that we decided to make the movie as it relates to shooting the poker scenes and being able to look at somebody’s cards,” Cates, Jr. says. “We know that’s what the TV audience at home would be looking at.”
Allowing the Deal audience a glimpse at players’ cards gives further insight into the characters and adds to the excitement of the film, just as giving the TV audience a glimpse at the cards makes poker tournaments a verifiable source of entertainment.
“Since they’ve figured out a way to show the audience the cards, the game of poker has changed,” long-time player Reynolds says. “It used to be like watching paint dry, where now it’s fascinating to know what they have in their hands.”
Jennifer Tilly, who is a regular on the World Poker Tour and plays one of Alex’s main opponents, Karen “Razor” Jones, agrees. “It’s like real-life drama now,” she says. “You know what the players have and you’re kind of living vicariously through them wondering, ‘Are they going to get caught bluffing? Are they going to win a half-million dollar pot?’”
While the built-in drama of the cards is the crux of the film, filmmakers went to great lengths to make sure that they could reproduce the spirit and energy of the American poker circuit by trying to capture the exact look and personality of the tournaments. Towards that end, surrounding Reynolds and Stillman at Deal’s Texas Hold’em tables are Chris Moneymaker, Joe Hachem, Isabelle Mercier, Greg Raymer, Antonio Esfandiari, and Phil Laak—many of professional poker’s leading money-winners. The co-hosts of the World Poker Tour, Michael Sexton and Vincent Van Patten, also figure prominently as themselves in the film.
Scott Lazar has been at the final table in the World Series of Poker and has taken in million-dollar pots, but like most of the other players, Deal marks his big screen debut. Unlike the others, he serves as an executive producer and the film’s poker consultant, ensuring all of the card scenes are as authentic as possible.
Having real-life players to model themselves after gave inspiration to the cast and crew, as did the film’s locations. Deal’s story jumps across the U.S. from the east coast to California to Las Vegas to New Orleans. The lights and casinos of Vegas are a necessary stop for Alex and any serious poker player, but the filmmakers chose to shoot the majority of the film in New Orleans. Feeling there was simply no substitute for the city, they went so far as to have the set used for the televised World Poker Tour World Championship shipped from Las Vegas to the Big Easy immediately after it was used in the actual Championship. “Gil [Cates, Jr.] and I scouted New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina,” producer Arata says. “We both loved what the city added to our film and we decided we would shoot the movie in New Orleans no matter what.”
The Jackpot
With so many professional players and poker enthusiasts on the set, it was impossible for the movie not to feel a bit like a real event—and impossible for the playing to stay on-screen. “There was some poker playing going on behind-the-scenes and some late nights,” Cates, Jr. admits. Deal’s young star Harrison enjoyed them, but he didn’t come away unscathed. “It’s so much fun having all these famous poker players around,” he says. “I mean, all we really did is play poker every night. I lost a lot of my per diem, but it’s worth it!”
For many of the professional players, however, striking bets when the TV cameras are off and the tables are closed is a way of life. “These professional guys can’t stand to just be standing around,” Reynolds says. “They’ve got to have something going on. They’ll start saying, ‘You want to bet $23,000 on whether that girl over there is going to walk over here or go right by us?’”
The deadpan actor is exaggerating—but not by much. “We were on-set with Antonio Esfandiari and Phil Laak and they were betting $24,000 between takes,” Harrison says. Laak, who is known by his nickname “The Unabomber,” explains: “We invented a game called 250-24. It’s a three-card war and you play for $250 and you keep doubling until you’re back to zero or you owe the guy $24,000.”
“We gamble on everything,” Esfandiari says. “Dinner each night, plane tickets, hotel rooms, whatever.” In some ways, their invented games are more fulfilling than actually playing poker with each other: The two multi-million dollar winners and sometimes roommates know each other so well, but both have such high skill levels, they can’t accurately interpret each other’s moves.
“The professional poker players that I’ve seen, it’s really hard to see their tells,” Cates, Jr. says. “Antonio and Phil were playing each other, and they’re so good, they can’t read each other. So, Antonio says to Phil, ‘You want a tell?’ Then Antonio showed his cards to the person sitting to his left so that Phil could try to read that person.”
Such game play could be intimidating to the unseasoned player, but luckily many of Deal’s cast members were drawn to the project because poker is a longtime hobby. For 16 years, Reynolds and his co-star, legendary actor Charles Durning, who plays Tommy’s friend Charlie, have played in the same Hollywood game together with James Garner, James Woods, and other actors. Jennifer Tilly has won multiple professional tournaments on the poker circuit and has become one of the most famous female faces on the scene.
Shannon Elizabeth has also become a regular at the tournaments and, while shooting the movie, let her skills work to her advantage. “The first night on set I doubled my money and challenged some of the guys to play,” she says. “The best thing about Shannon is that she is the most ferocious card player I’ve ever seen,” producer Arata says. “She’s like a man-eater. A lot of our cast members don’t like her around when they’re playing because she’s clipped into them pretty good.”
As the number of celebrity tournaments attests, interest in the game on the part of Hollywood’s talent is no coincidence. “Poker has become the actor’s game,” WPT co-host Vincent Van Patten says. “Everyone in Hollywood wants to play this game because it’s their escape and they can do really well. If you’re a good actor and you get the game of poker, you’ll be an excellent poker player.”
Like the film’s young protégé Alex, every player, including actors, must learn to read the opponents and play defense with their own reactions and expressions. “In the beginning, actors are easier to read because our faces are trained to be very mobile,” Tilly says. Over time, however, that detriment can become an advantage. “As an actor, you should be able to hide the tells so that you can’t read them on the face,” Reynolds says.
For Lazar, the crossover between acting and poker playing isn’t really a transition at all. “Everybody at the poker table is an actor,” he says. “There are good actors and there are bad actors. Some people act strong when they are weak and some people act weak when they are really strong. And some people act strong when they are strong, but give the impression they are weak.” As Tilly sums it up, “Poker is a game of wits. It’s psychological warfare.” When the war is over, at the tables, in the back rooms, and on the set of Deal, only the smartest players remain standing.
Deal (2008)
Directed by: Gil Cates Jr.
Starring: Burt Reynolds, Charles Durning, Bret Harrison, Gary Grubbs, Shannon Elizabeth, Jennifer Tilly, Maria Mason, Mike Sexton, Vincent Van Patten, Antonio Esfandiari
Screenplay by: Gil Cates Jr., Mark Weinstock
Production Design by: Frank Zito
Cinematography by: Tom Harting
Film Editing by: Jonathan Cates, Eric Strand
Costume Design by: Liz Staub
Music by: Peter Rafelson
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for language, sexual content and brief drug use.
Distributed by: Metro Goldwyn Mayer
Release Date: April 25, 2008
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