Cool pool movie

Rating: 7/10 (12 February 2012)

Martin Scorsese's follow-up of sorts to the 1959 film The Hustler finds him in a far less interesting state than usual, but it's a perfectly fine piece of entertainment all the same. Maybe it is hard to make a spectacular film about 9-ball, I don't know. Of course, the film is more about the people than the game.
The main trio in the film – the aging "hustler" Eddie Felson (Paul Newman), the hotheaded newcomer (Tom Cruise) and his tough girlfriend (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) – is a setup we have seen in a thousand movies, but they all play their parts as great as they possible could. Dramaturgically there's not much new going on either, except that the film might have an unusually long stretch of setbacks and people getting mad at each other. But despite Newman's arguments with the couple, the film never really hits a nerve or feels very exciting, possibly with the exception of a certain revelation in a hotel room.
Stylistically, The Color of Money is sort of a precursor to Goodfellas and Casino, inasmuch as a film about pool can be so. The camera hovers around pool halls, there are long tracking shots of billiard balls in which Paul Newman can see his mirror image, and there are fast cuts between cool breaks. And the smoky, jukeboxy soundtrack is definitely classic Scorsese ground (except less interesting). All in all, it's a solid film, and as a moderate fan of playing pool, I do derive some pleasure from seeing those cool breaks.