The Last Play for the Envelope

Rating: 8/10 (9 December 2006)

The characters in The Color of Money have a deep love for the game of pool, but what the movie shows us is the intricacies of hustling your opponent and making the proper haggle or deal. However, it's not quite a con film because as the audience, we're looking beyond the money and the hustles. What it seems for the first two acts to mainly be about is the generational divide between the three main characters. Humility comes naturally to the genuine old pro of a bygone generation of hot rods and guys in visors (he assumes Carmen doesn't work), but it doesn't come virtually impossible for the hot-blooded young Brat Pack generation stud (he can't conceive of how appearing to lose helps him win).
Played by Tom Cruise the same year he did Top Gun, Vincent is almost too broadly young-dumb-full-of-cum. "Let's not make a federal production out of it!" During the first half hour, we watch this extraordinarily impulsive guy and are pulled in mainly by the question of how on earth Eddie's going to whip him into some reserved, masterful grifter. The blustering after Eddie saves him from being pulverized by a bar full of angry hustlers, shouting he'll stick a cue down a guy's throat, blow them away with a cannon. What is he, 15? It may sound humdrum, like maybe there's going to be a love triangle that buds from Carmen's own very confidently commercial mind, but this cliché is deferred for the sake of the singular integrity of each of the three central characters. After Carmen sizes Eddie up, only beginning to work her womanly wiles on him before being patently discouraged, she knows she has to take him seriously. What the old man wants, he goes after with expertise, cunningand desperate hunger. And it's compelling to watch him scheme.
Scorsese is a master of momentum. Even he himself has expressed on many occasions that he doesn't understand sports, has little interest in them, yet this is his second sports-related film. With Raging Bull, he used that sport as metaphor. Here, he uses game as skill, as art. And the wild results of each situation lead to another set of dramatic circumstances and questions of what each character is intending to happen contrasted with how things play out. Michael Ballhaus' camera is as clever and careful about "human moves" regarding the characters in front of it as they are. We're pulled into the mental whirlwind of life on the hustle.
About 45 minutes in, Eddie shoots his first break in 35 years. Newman perfectly plays a guy who doesn't know if he's still got it, finds out he still does and plays like he already knew, all under a lifelong guise of veteran confidence. Scorsese shoots it perfectly. It's almost like sexual release, followed by the strutting elation that rubs off on Cruise and bonds the two. They're no longer just wise old guy schooling immature young guy. They're a pair of hustlers at the top of their game. But will the young one know how to take it in stride like the old man, or will his ego spin out of control? The dilemma becomes a matter of a jackpot by Eddie who reveals himself to have his own innate approach to the game: He just wants to play and show everyone he's the best. Why should Eddie want to break a horse that's already a champion? How far will he push this young man to recapture his own youth? Scorsese's real achievement here is not merely overcoming the challenge of a sports picture or a johnnie-come-lately sequel, but in pulling us into a character trifecta until the last 45 minutes, during which we see Eddie's quest has never been about Vincent, when there is a shift in the film's tone and atmosphere. Newman's character becomes a machine painstakingly observing a skill to astonishing precision, and that skill comes to be portrayed increasingly less like a hustling device and increasingly more like a reach for the big time.