Review

Steve Buscemi cuts so droll and heart-wrenching a figure in Hue Rhodes’s deadpan road movie Saint John of Las Vegas that the plot—shaggy and inconsequential as it is—gets in the way. Buscemi plays the title role, a compulsive gambler who flees Vegas after a hair-raising unlucky streak and takes a desk job at an Albuquerque auto-insurance firm. He has the look of a man who’s escaped from cannibals in mid–head shrink: gray skin pulled tight, cadaverous hollows, eyes bulging in fear. High-strung as he is, though, Buscemi won’t be cast as the next Barney Fife. His voice is dry, world-weary, and his air of haunted fatalism gives him stature.

It’s too bad Sarah Silverman plays the dotty officemate who falls for him. I love her stand-up, but her acting is all hipster camp—and she and Buscemi don’t mesh. When John and a fraud investigator (Romany Malco) head back to Vegas to investigate a stripper’s injury claim, the film turns into one of those indie parades of eccentrics that are hit-and-miss but mostly miss. One bit, though, is genius. John interviews a tow-truck driver (John Cho) who moonlights as a carnival human torch—only his torch suit has malfunctioned and the poor man has to sit behind his tent and wait for his fuel tank to empty. Every twenty seconds, in mid-conversation, he bursts into flames, and the interview stops until they die down. It’s so poetically apt. Their situations are different, but John and Torch share a stoic dignity. They hold on to hope even in a world that delivers regular scorchings. — David Edelstein