THE COOLER is a classic example of a wonderful little film, made very inexpensively with an excellently written script and magnificent performances from the three leads. It brings to mind HARD EIGHTS from a few years ago starring Philip Baker Hall.

Set in a sleazy Las Vegas casino, the gimpy William H. Macy works as a “cooler” and lives nearby in a cheap motel. He is named the “cooler” due to his uncanny ability, or shall we say “vibes,” to cool off a gambler's hot streak and make him start losing, just by playing next to him in blackjack, or standing chatting beside him while he is playing craps.

The back-story is that any money he makes is used to pay off a large, long-standing debt he owes to the sadistic casino boss and his long-time friend, scorchingly played by Alec Baldwin. It was Baldwin who years ago had broken his knee with a baseball bat over a similar gambling debt, hence his pronounced limp, so the two have a long history. Worried that his cooler may quit, Baldwin fixes him up with a cocktail waitress in the casino brilliantly played by Maria Bello.

She is meant to keep an eye on him, but something goes wrong with the well-laid plan. The two misfits unexpectedly fall in love. Bello exquisitely captures the jaded and downtrodden desperation of her cocktail waitress who falls for Macy despite herself, because of his kindness and decency towards her. Macy of course has no peer when it comes to playing sad-sack losers with a heart that audiences relate to, and here he also gets to play the romantic lead, complete with touchingly funny sex scenes and even frontal nudity! The chemistry between him and Bello is as good as it gets, and one really feels the deep connection of these two downtrodden souls thrown together on the scrapheap of life.

I don't wish to divulge too much more of the story, suffice to say that Macy's loser son shows up with a very pregnant wife in tow and tries to hustle him for money.  Everything goes down hill from there, and the cooler begins to lose his magic touch.

Baldwin has the more showy role as the scumbag old school casino boss, grating under pressure from the yuppie executive sent in by the corporation that owns his operation to modernize it. He excellently portrays a man who will stop at nothing to keep his business in profit the old-fashioned mob way, and detests the modern Vegas way of doing things. He is amoral, sadistic and stubborn, but it is a measure of Baldwin's performance that we still like him.

This is a realistic, gritty, well-acted film about the underbelly of Las Vegas, one of the best I have ever seen.