By the mid-’80s, Martin Scorsese had already established his versatility as a filmmaker despite his narrow reputation as a chronicler of male violence and mean streets. In fact, he’d proven his deft touch with stories centered on women, as well as comedy and documentary, with a broad skill set drawn from close study and deep love of the craft of cinema. With The Color of Money, Scorsese again went somewhere he hadn’t gone before: a spiritual sequel to another filmmaker’s movie, Robert Rossen’s The Hustler, released in 1961. That film starred a youthful and impetuous Paul Newman in the titular role, a prodigy stirring up trouble and honing his skills in pool halls. 25 years later, Newman wanted to revisit the character, and he insisted upon working with Scorsese because of the way the director had captured the essence of the prizefighter Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull. While these three films are quite distinct in plot and tone, at their core they are all about competition, identity and obsolescence–themes which crop up repeatedly in Scorsese’s oeuvre.
While the film shares the title of the novel by Walter Tevis, the script, penned by Richard Price, takes the story in a different direction that was designed to spotlight the friction between Newman’s character and a cocky young pretender to billiards glory. That would be Tom Cruise, in peak Top Gun-era form. Newman’s Fast Eddie Felson hasn’t played a game professionally since the events of the previous film, having redirected his focus and charm to selling whiskey. That gig has been successful enough to buy him some nice threads and a white Cadillac, but he finds himself hanging around a lot in bars watching lesser dudes shoot pool. When he witnesses a show-offy game by a swaggering jackass, Vince (Cruise), his interest is piqued. Crucially, it’s not just Vince’s talent that catches his eye, it’s also his cocksure attitude that suggests he’d be easy to manipulate. Eddie’s always looking for an edge.
Between these two male archetypes, we find the script’s most interesting element: Vince’s quick-witted and sharp-eyed girlfriend, Carmen (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio). She recognizes immediately that Fast Eddie represents both an opportunity and a threat for Vince, and she positions herself as Vince’s de facto manager. In a story where reading and deceiving others is the key to success, the battle of wits between Eddie and Carmen is fascinating to observe. She attempts to leverage her sex appeal to gain advantage, which Eddie is smart enough to deflect. It’s a wry acknowledgement that Newman, even in his 60s, remained a credible sex symbol who could, if he wanted, steal Tom Cruise’s girl without lifting a finger. In fact, Eddie has a more elevated goal in mind: he wants to coach Vince in the fine art of hustling that he himself once mastered. Vince, he believes, possesses a pair of essential characteristics: he’s supremely skilled, and he’s a flake. The first is essential for winning games; the second can be honed to bait suckers into playing him in the first place. Eddie hopes to impart this hard-earned lesson, and profit from it: “Sometimes if you lose, you win.”
Tom Cruise is perfectly suited for this role, displaying both skill and foolishness in abundance. The ego that radiates off of him is both his superpower and his Kryptonite. Despite Eddie’s counsel, Vince can’t bear to allow himself to lose games, and so he scares off the rich marks who would otherwise be willing to bet big and lose. While the milieu of pool halls and tournaments doesn’t seem that it would be as morally depraved as that of the mafiosos and killers that Scorsese has so often dramatized, this story snaps with deceptions, mind games, betrayals and payback, all while hundred-dollar bills are tossed across the green felt. It’s a sordid underworld, exposed in fine-grained detail by Scorsese’s quasi-documentary approach that combines sweeping camera work with the calm observance of a culture that is foreign to most. (The director himself provides the opening voiceover lesson on the game of nine-ball.) In Michael Ballhaus’s superb cinematography, billiard balls glide and collide like bumper cars at eye level in an almost abstract choreography that echoes the invisible geometry of the manipulations that every character is up to.
While on a superficial level The Color of Money is a continuation of another director’s vision, in fundamental ways this is a Scorsese film through and through. All the beats are here: men exploring their essential nature through conflict and action, women striving for self-realization in the moral vacuum the men leave behind, a subculture closed off from polite society but as complex and contradictory as any den of thieves. Another of the director’s calling cards is the commitment and artistry he inspires in his performers, and this is palpable in every scene. Cruise was still decades away from scaling the Burj Khalifa for a movie stunt, but here he performed nearly all of his own playing, allowing for some high-wire moments of uncut takes as he sinks one improbable bank shot after another, all while delivering his lines with a shit-eating grin. Mastrantonio counteracts this hot shot energy with calculation and intelligence; it’s clear that no matter what else happens in this story, she’s going to come out on top.
But of course, this is Paul Newman’s show. He would go on to win a Best Actor Oscar for the role where his finest moments are in the small gestures, the side-eyes and the way he lies so smoothly that he seems to believe it himself. It’s a performance of great restraint and naturalism, made all the more poignant for the few moments where something else shines through. After seemingly defeating Vince at a high-stakes game, Fast Eddie walks calmly through the events center, betraying not even a smile at his victory. But then, before interacting with anyone, he takes a moment to step outside. The camera watches cooly through the glass as he pumps his fist and shouts “Yes!” to no one at all. Composed again, he comes back inside and goes on his way, cool as ever. You want his triumph to be as real as he felt it to be. But in The Color of Money, even when you win, you lose.
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