Lay the Favourite - review

 
p42. Lay Fav - edition 22/6
Derek Malcolm22 June 2012

There have been more authoritative American films from British director Stephen Frears than this nifty lightweight comedy, but none more full of recognisable players straining at the leash.

Based on Beth Raymer’s gambling memoir, Lay the Favourite has Rebecca Hall as the ditzy lady herself and Bruce Willis as the professional betting man who takes her on and falls for her.  

According to the book, Raymer was a “private dancer” whose ambition was to become a cocktail waitress but is now a best-selling author with a masters degree from Columbia. In the middle of all this, she worked for a gambler who had found a way to beat the odds and make a decent living out of it.

British actress Hall, so good in Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona, plays Raymer as an endearing force of nature who somehow manages to survive in a dangerous world through sheer force of character.

Willis is Willis, an actor who gets better and better as the years go by — if and when his script and director allow. Here he plays Dink, an ex-New York bookie with a shady past whose prowess as an impulsive gambler in Las Vegas is somewhat negated by his controlling wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones). Equipped with socks and  khaki shorts, he is about as far from the familiar action hero as it’s possible to get.

Adding to this mix are Vince Vaughn, as a New York bookie called Rosie, who takes our erratic heroine on when Dink reluctantly gets rid of her; and Joshua Jackson, as the straight-up guy who gets in trouble with the law when he helps Beth out.

The film moves from Florida to Vegas and New York, taking in the island of Curacao as well, doesn’t overstay its welcome and  shows us how a talented woman with no idea how to make the most of her life comes out whole. If it’s not one of Frears’s most notable pieces, it’s a divertissement that’s easy to enjoy, largely because he’s paid sufficient attention to D V DeVincentis’s script and given his actors full rein.

There are echoes of The Grifters but in a much lighter, almost throwaway vein.

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