Mark Wahlberg bets on upside-down remake of 1974 film

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This article was published 18/12/2014 (4272 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

New YORK CITY — Like many a contemporary Hollywood movie, The Gambler is a remake. In 1974, James Caan starred as the title character, a college professor with a pathological addiction to gambling that brings the edgy academic into uncomfortably close quarters with ruthless criminal elements.

In 2014, the new movie of the same name keeps the premise, but takes it into a different direction, befitting its star, Mark Wahlberg, director Rupert Wyatt, and especially screenwriter William Monahan (The Departed), who flatly states at a press conference for the film: “I don’t believe in addiction per se.”

“I happen to come from a mindset where I think everything is voluntary,” Monahan says. “Like, right now, I really want a Marlboro. But if I have one, I’ve made a choice to do it.

“So I don’t believe in addiction; therefore, half of what’s there (in the original film) just fell away,” he says. “And I was able to romp with it.”

In this new version, the hero seems actually bent on self-destruction, a reaction to his silver-spoon upbringing and his academic prestige.

“This is a guy who has everything, has all the social trappings, but it’s a gilded cage,” says director Rupert Wyatt (Rise of the Planet of the Apes). “He’s someone who clearly wants to escape and he uses gambling.”

The film, Wyatt says, is “an anti-materialistic movie.

“It’s about an over-dog wanting to become an underdog,” he says. “And I think that’s quite a rare gem in these days.”

Monahan may have taken liberties with James Toback’s original screenplay, but the old and new film do share an interesting dynamic. The heroes are played by actors — Caan and Wahlberg — more easily associated with physicality and street-smarts, both of whom took a big leap to portray intellectuals.

“For me, it was very different from anything that I’ve done before,” says Wahlberg, who dropped some 60 pounds of muscle to portray a physically slight professor of literature.

“I am used to playing the underdogs, as opposed to playing the guy who has everything and is trying to strip himself of all that to become an underdog.”

Lacking his own post-secondary education, Wahlberg says he educated himself to the college milieu, “going to various universities, seeing professors, going to lectures with Rupert and wandering around UCLA,” he says.

His efforts to fit in reminded him of his first feature-film experience, making the 1994 comedy Renaissance Man for director Penny Marshall opposite Danny De Vito.

“Everybody else I had met in the film world was very different from me,” he says. “And then I met them and they spoke the same language and they seemed to be from the same sort of place that I was from.”

“It was a miracle that I found acting and the process of making films,” he says.

You might say the move to acting was a gamble that landed Wahlberg the jackpot.

“When you think about all the various projects I have worked on and the different people I have worked with, every day I just wake up and pinch myself,” he says. “I feel so lucky to have found my true calling and what really drives me and pushes me and challenges me and allows me to learn and see the world.”

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca