April 2, 2003 | When your mug shot appears as the punchline for an Oscarcast opening monologue, it’s usually an indication that your career, along with your life, has taken a turn for the worse. But Nick Nolte is an indomitable survivor -– magnificently ravaged, yet scarcely diminished, by epic excess –- and all the tabloid accounts of his legendarily untidy private life only serve to enhance the authenticity of his latest, and one of his greatest, film performances.
Whether he’s staggering through the mean streets of Nice or swaggering through the casinos of Monte Carlo, Nolte is in great form as the garrulous Bob Montagnet, a gone-to-seed master thief and compulsive gambler, in Neil Jordan’s sensationally enjoyable The Good Thief . The role fits him like a glove – or, more precisely, like the tattered cloak of a slumming monarch – and he infuses the character with the melancholy grace and witty self-awareness of a man who views disaster as neither unfamiliar nor entirely unpleasant. At one point, someone asks Bob what will happen if, as seems highly likely, he loses the last of his savings at the racetrack. “Then I’ll have hit rock bottom,” Bob replies with a fatalistic shrug, “and I’ll have to change my ways.” Which he does, sort of. When the horse fails to reach the winner’s circle, Bob is indeed forced to contemplate an even more perilous gamble.
Good Thief is billed as a remake of Bob le Flambeur ( Bob the Gambler ), French auteur Jean-Pierre Melville’s cult-fave 1955 drama about an aging rogue who rouses himself from semi-retirement for one last heist. But Jordan’s coolly stylish version is really more of a jazzy-bluesy riff on the earlier film’s hard-boiled romantic notions of grace under pressure and honor among thieves.
Much like the protagonist of Melville’s caper, Bob Montagnet is a formidable figure in a colorfully seedy demimonde: Effortlessly authoritative in his ironic detachment, deferentially regarded by old hands and young wanna-bes. But very much unlike Melville’s anti-hero, a trenchcoated knight errant who breezes through dusk-to-dawn Paris like a elegant ghost, the Bob of Good Thief is a self-deconstructed ruin who holds court, and shoots smack, in the back room of the seediest dive on the French Riviera.
Even while plumbing the lower depths, however, Bob remains capable of trenchant observation and impulsive nobility. He glimpses Anne (Nutsa Kukhianidze), a sexy 17-year-old Russian immigrant, as she prepares to turn tricks, and gruffly warns her: “You’re too young to work here.” Not batting an eye, Anne offers an equally blunt appraisal while referencing his hypodermic — “You’re too old to do that!” – and Bob immediately recognizes that, despite the gaping generation gap, they are soul mates.
He winds up saving her from a brutish pimp – not because of lust, because he thinks it would be “silly” for them to be lovers, but because it’s the sort of honorable gesture he simply can’t resist. For similar reasons, he saves the life of Roger (Tcheky Karyo), the friendly cop who wants to save Bob from himself, even if that might mean arresting his unlikely savior.
The Good Thief builds, slowly and slyly, to a clever heist at a Cannes casino where priceless paintings are kept in vaults while flawless copies are exhibited. (The ironic ending reprises Melville’s original, but with a few satisfyingly sassy twists.) To even attempt the robbery, Bob must quit heroin cold turkey, assemble a motley crew of co-conspirators, remain one step ahead of a grudge-bearing traitor – and credibly impersonate a spiffily-dressed high-roller with a gorgeous young woman (Anne, of course) on his arm. No sweat. As Bob tells his comely companion as they approach the gaming tables: “Always play the game to the limit.”
