In the 1986 film The Color of Money, there is an outstanding scene in which Tom Cruise’s character, Vince, slowly reveals his Balabushka cue stick to his opponent, a small-time hustler, and, referring to the cue as “doom,” proceeds to methodically and smugly trounce his competitor in 9-ball.

In fascinating contrast is Kailey, the pool hustler played by Famke Janssen in Chris Eigeman’s 2007 movie Turn the River.  An immensely talented billiards player, Kailey takes no joy in pool.  She has no cue stick of her own, instead using house cues to hustle for gas money, and later in the movie, to raise the necessary funds to rescue and flee with her son.

The Color of Money presents the pool-playing hustler as a cocksure warrior, brandishing a cue stick like a katana, deftly twirling it like a bō and stabbing at the air. Turn the River is the opposite.  It’s the story of the anti-hustler, the reluctant samurai, seemingly forced to play a role, but only to escape a fate.

As an individual movie, viewed entirely on its own merit, Turn the River is passable, at best.  The gorgeous Janssen, a former fashion model and best known as Jean Grey/Phoenix in X-Men, is decent in the role, but it’s a little hard to accept her as a worn-down single mom from the school of hard knocks.  Divorced from her husband and without visitation rights to see her 11-year old son Gulley, she hatches a plan to take her son away from his father, who she believes has been abusing him.  To succeed, she’ll need $60,000 to flee to Canada with fake passports.  So, with the help of her friend and pool-hall proprietor Teddy Quinette (played by the awesomely-named Rip Torn and similar in every way to Rod Steiger’s friend and pool-hall proprietor role in Poolhall Junkies), a high-stakes pool game is organized. If the logic is a little questionable up to this point, it gets downright absurd in the last quarter of the movie, once Kailey wins the non-suspenseful pool match and proceeds to “steal” her son.

But, as one of the better-known members of the billiards movie canon, Turn the River presents a number of interesting themes and cinematic choices that are worth discussing in more detail.

First and foremost, as mentioned above, is the creation of an ‘anti-hustler.’  Kailey has no pool ambition like “Fast” Eddie Felson in The Hustler.  She employs no braggadocio, there are no taunts, like those quipped by Johnny Doyle in Poolhall Junkies (e.g., “You watch my mouth, Chico. ‘Cause you sure as hell don’t wanna watch me play pool. Unless, of course, I’m blind-folded and hand-cuffed with a pool cue stickin’ out of my ass.”).

In fact, she seems to barely understand the game of hustling, as she is caught off-guard to learn one of her adversaries, Ralph (played by Tony “Silent Assassin” Robles, one of the top 10 billiards professionals in the world and the movie’s pool technical advisor), is throwing games, or that for her to win $60,000, she’ll need a “stalking horse” (i.e., someone who can lose well to an opponent to encourage him to bet large).  She doesn’t even appreciate that her opponent, Duncan, will “try to fuck with [her], knock [her] off [her] rhythm.” All Kailey has are her formidable billiards skills.

Director Chris Eigeman and technical pool advisor Tony “Silent Assassin” Robles

Variety Magazine made this interesting observation: “In casting a woman in a traditionally male role, Eigeman subtly shifts both genre and gender.  His heroine adopts the iconography of the hustler movie, but feminizes it.” And, in this sense, Kailey is first a mother, and only second a pool player.  This is dramatically different than the famous male billiards hustlers, for whom pool-playing is their sole identity.

Eigeman’s approach to filming pool is equally interesting. In an interview with IFC, he said, “I was always interested in how much [pool] I had to show. It can get really uninteresting watching balls fall into pockets — it’s a lot like sex scenes, here [what’s] going is infinitely less interesting than [the expressions on] people’s faces.”

In the DVD commentary, he added, “The goal was to show as little pool as possible because it was never just a movie about pool.  We had to show just enough to keep the movie moving.” But, the pool had to be compelling and feel authentic, while still adhering to a very limited budget.  To achieve this, the cast and crew took over a pool-hall for six non-stop days of shooting pool.  They were able to shoot 360-degrees, filming everything with the hope that the shots could be edited together in post-production to form a coherent story.

Eigeman expanded in the same IFC interview: “We were very controlled and very loose…the controlled was we built 20 or 30 pool shots — we took pictures of them, put them in a notebook and named them: Ann, Betty, whatever…all the way down. So we had these shots, and the last shot that Famke makes — Zelda — and we knew that was the shot that we would end all the pool with.”  (“Zelda” being a reference to the four-bank carom shot that Kailey makes to win the match.  Janssen, who did all her own pool-shooting in the film, made this shot on her first attempt, though a full half-day of filming had been budgeted to get it right.)

Finally, it’s intriguing that for most of the movie, the game played is one-pocket, a type of pocket billiards in which “the player making the break chooses a foot corner pocket for the rest of the game; all of that shooter’s balls must be shot into that pocket. All of the opponent’s balls must be made in the other foot corner pocket.”  To my knowledge, Turn the River is the only billiards movie to feature one-pocket, though the final match consists of a race to seven in the more widely known 9-ball.  When her opponent opts to switch to 9-ball, Kailey retorts by referring to 9-ball as “a chumpy game…that’s beneath us.”   Presumably, this is her way of mocking 9-ball, a game that can involve some luck, compared to one-pocket, a game that purists would argue involves almost no luck when played expertly.

Turn the River is widely available for rent or to purchase online or on DVD.