A fascinating but ultimately disappointing documentary from filmmaker Luke Korem, Dealt profiles Richard Turner, who can do things with playing cards that have to be seen to be believed. Every waking moment, Turner practices, sometimes with two or three decks at a time, holding them in one hand as he walks down the street, sits in church and even while having sex with his wife. There’s something else that he would very much rather no one knew: Richard Turner is entirely blind.
The movie shows Turner performing for about 15 minutes before acknowledging his blindness, a morsel of coyness to whet our appetites. When Turner performs, it is a marvelous, joyous thing: A queen of spades becomes a two of diamonds; a stranger shuffles a deck and deals himself four aces; with one hand, Turner cuts a deck to the exact number of cards specified by a random participant. Nothing disappears. Nothing ends up in wine bottles or in a watermelon, a la the great sleight-of-hand artist Ricky Jay.
Turner is a “card mechanic.” He’s in the business of manipulating cards to achieve a desired result. In casinos, it’s called cheating. Here, it’s marvelous entertainment. And all the time, he’s seeing none of it, a fact we’re reminded of by regular footage of him decrying the labels “blind” and “disabled” to the camera. “The blind thing” is embarrassing and maddening to him, even as he is a testament to overcoming physical limitation through force of will.
Allowing himself to be the subject of a feature-length documentary may seem an odd way to keep the news under wraps, but in Korem’s telling, Turner’s arc bends toward self-acceptance. There’s no avoiding the fact that while the things Turner can do would be extraordinary for someone with fully functional retinas; his skills are genuinely astounding given that he can’t see. So what’s Turner’s experience as a blind man performing these feats of legerdemain? This is but one of many questions Dealt doesn’t ask.
The documentary’s structure is of the talking-heads and first-person-confessional variety, with slow pans over sepia photos. Turner’s colleagues appear at regular intervals to attest to his exceptional, even singular brilliance, with their names and credentials (“Casino Security Expert”) captioned underneath: It’s the Shelby Foote treatment. Turner is a candid and open subject, and his brusque manner can be quite charming. “I’ve been fishing all my life,” he says. “I can feel a fish fart within three feet of my hook.” But Korem’s camera is anchored to a cement block. It rarely moves, and when it does, it’s because someone is walking through an airport. A static, interview-room composition can be perfectly suited to its subject, and in its immobility free us to engage with what the subjects facing the lens are saying. That doesn’t happen here. There’s a feeling of being either cloistered and rooted or else on a walkabout. The documentary filmmaker needs to be a visual storyteller. Otherwise, why make movies?
Describing his early years manipulating cards, Turner says, “I didn’t need to see what I was doing. I could feel what I was doing.” Give yourself a moment to realize that you have no earthly idea what this means. Dealt makes room for plenty of the same. What begins as a thoroughly engaging and absolutely fascinating portrait of a prodigiously gifted man becomes familiar and gooey as Korem turns away from Turner’s art and craft to his empty-nest-induced crisis of late middle age.
The movie elides so much, and without acknowledgement, it sometimes feels as if it has been edited for broadcast on lower-tier cable television. One might wonder, what is Turner’s experience as he maintains full knowledge of each card’s position, even as the deck goes through multiple shuffles, cuts and recombinations? How does it differ from how other card mechanics achieve similar feats? Why does he refuse to learn Braille? Does he regret appropriating his only child to act as his guide, stage manager, negotiator, and roustabout? Why does he have 10,000 decks of cards in his house, and where are they?
Korem is not interested in these questions. He turns away from cards, in all their marvel and mystery, to the home front. The movie exchanges Turner the card-master for Turner the sad dad. Dealt becomes a conventional story of lost purpose and ultimate triumph. By the end of the movie, bad-ass Richard Turner sounds like a needlepoint sampler: “Believe that you are special!” But don’t blame him. Luke Korem’s the one holding all the cards.
(by Jim Stuntz)
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