"Always play to the limit and damn the consequences."
Such is the advice of Bob (Nick Nolte) to his surrogate daughter/possible love interest Anne (Nutsa Kukhianidze) as they enter a Monte Carlo casino to take their place in what they hope will be the heist of a lifetime in The Good Thief. Bob's statement could very well be the motto of the film's creator, writer-director Neil Jordan, whose career has had its share of jackpots (The Crying Game, The Butcher Boy, The End of the Affair) and crap-outs (In Dreams, Interview With the Vampire). No matter the outcome, Jordan always plays the game to the limit, making him one of the more consistently fascinating filmmakers of the past two decades.

Many have already taken issue with the fact that his latest is a remake of a classic, Jean-Pierre Melville's Bob le flambeur. Though the concern is understandable, I will assert that Bob le flambeur is not exactly Psycho, and The Good Thief is by no means a shot-for-shot travesty, keeping better company with the "cinematic reworkings" of Brian De Palma than Gus Van Sant.

The heist film genre has been mined repeatedly for more than half a century now, yet it endures-largely due to the vicarious thrill audiences receive from being allowed entrée into a forbidden world. Recent entries like Soderbergh's Ocean's 11 have been more concerned with style than substance, depending more on cool gadgets, slick scenery, and plot gimmicks to ingratiate themselves. For the most part, The Good Thief takes a different road, and the end result is something grittier and much more substantial.

The story is standard heist movie fare: a down-and-out filch gets one last shot at the big score. The Thief of the title is Bob Montagnet, a broken-down expatriate who lives in Nice and divides his time between his twin muses, gambling and heroin. But as the title suggests, he's got his own set of ethics and a firm belief in luck. One night, Bob saves Anne, a 17-year-old Eastern European, from the clutches of a local pimp. In the film's most dynamic relationship, the lives of these two become intertwined. He is a father figure to her, someone she idolizes and, more importantly, someone she trusts. She reaches out to him the only way she knows how, by making herself sexually available. This desperation is mirrored in the lengths Bob goes to protect her. To him, she represents a chance to do something right, to turn her life around before she ends up like him. Though the sexual tension between the two is always palpable, he knows he's too old for her. Instead of a sex object, she becomes more of a talisman.

When Bob is presented with an opportunity that could turn his life-long losing streak around, stealing priceless artwork from a Monte Carlo casino, he accepts the challenge as casually as a spin of the roulette wheel. The dynamics of the heist are handled adroitly. Jordan actually one-ups Melville by staging the casino heist only as a decoy for the real heist, which is to take place across the street in a seemingly impregnable vault. In keeping with the biblical allusion of the title, Bob even anticipates a double cross and preemptively chooses his own Judas.

Atmosphere is Jordan's forte: through a seemingly effortless marriage of image and sound, the director creates a mood that lasts long after his film's closing credits. In the opening of his masterpiece, The Crying Game, Jordan uses the indelible strains of "When a Man Loves a Woman" to create a desperate tone, and follows with a series of intricate interpersonal relationships that strengthen and refine the meaning of the song. Here, Jordan employs a similar device by his inspired use of a recent Leonard Cohen song to flesh out the character of Bob. Chris Menges's elegant handheld camerawork, bathed in blues and reds, breathes an opium haze into the sordid surroundings, which is authenticated by the eclectic club jazz score. The narcotic rhythms are punctuated with a series of brief freeze-frames, an initially distracting device which lends a woozy, hung-over perspective to a woozy, perpetually hung-over protagonist.

Nick Nolte seems comfortable in Bob's skin (or maybe this is the character the actor was born to play). Whatever the case, he throws himself into the work, and with Jordan reigning him in, he delivers one of his finest performances. One can only hope that the agonizing withdrawal scene didn't emerge from sense memory. Likewise, newcomer Kukhianidze is excellent in expanding what, in most other films of this sort, would have been a thankless role. She imbues Anne with a tough-girl exterior that masks the naïve runaway's intense vulnerability. One doesn't need to see the bruise beneath her eye to understand her back story. Her aloof Georgian monotone also does wonders with dialogue, transforming what could have been standard heist film banter into something curiously referential. It seems as though Anne taught herself to walk and talk by watching American B-movies.

In terrific bits of stunt casting, Underground director Emir Kusturica plays an essential member of Bob's crew and Ralph Fiennes pops up as a shady art dealer (having fun with the line "what I do to your faces will definitely be cubist"). The film's only major misstep comes in what appears to be a misguided attempt at humorous self-reference. Jordan delivers an arachnophobic transgender strong man as one of Bob's crew. This wouldn't have seemed so noxious had it not been for the fact that a crucial plot point hinges around what seems to be the only caricature in a cast of fully drawn characters. In an otherwise tight screenplay, this character screams for revision.

In the endings of most Hollywood heist films, it is common practice to want to have it both ways. Either the hero gets what he wants and gets the girl, or he loses the big score only to discover something even more valuable about himself. Without giving too much away, I'll only say that Jordan wants to have his ending three ways. It is testament to Jordan as a filmmaker that, by seemingly defying narrative logic, the gamble pays off perfectly. The Good Thief is not a major work, but it plays its game to the limit.
- DAVID CONNELLY