by Zakiyyah Madyun, Staff Writer

At the opening of The Hustler, a man watching by the bar describes Newman’s character as a “nice looking boy, clean cut.” He is Paul Newman after-all, but this character depiction is a foil to the man he is about to portray over the next two-hours. For a 1961 classic featuring one of Hollywood’s Golden Age stars, The Hustler is surprisingly dark as it takes on addiction, manipulation, and insidious greed.

Pool can be both a sport and a con, requiring a combination of skill, luck, and ego. Newman’s character, “Fast” Eddie Felson, is both skilled and lucky, but his ego is a vicious weed that quickly strangles out any and all of his redeeming qualities. Like 2024’s Challengers, The Hustler is a sports drama that uses the turn-based style of each respective game to echo the complex relationships between characters.

Unlike Challengers, which boasts a pulsing Reznor and Ross score and uses the rhythmic thump of the tennis ball to accelerate tension, The Hustler is suspiciously quiet and cold. For the majority of its runtime, there is no music to carry the prolonged pool scenes. For a film with such a relaxed pace, I spent a decent amount of time with an Uncut Gems level heart rate. “Fast Eddie” boasts a confident charm and an icy handsomeness, but at his core he really isn’t far from Gem’s Howard Ratner in his gambling addictions, bumbling arrogance, and increasingly horrible decision making.

The Hustler was ahead of its time in its cold examination of an insufferable egoist. There are fantastic movies in recent years that do the opposite, coming closer to an idolization of unrepentant competitors and their holy thirst for achievement. In Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash, central character Andrew fights tooth and nail for recognition from his abusive instructor. And in Black Swan, we watch Natalie Portman’s Nina defy the boundaries of her own psyche to reach perfection in the eyes of seductive director Thomas Leroy. Despite the dire circumstances of these leads, there remains something aspirational, deeply unrealistic, and intrinsically American about their journeys. We often love and are charmed by characters who will do anything it takes to get what they want: while their actions are depraved, their dreams take on a weird air of purity. Perfection. More fable than fact. The Hustler brings this fantasy back down to earth. Without art, love, or craftsmanship to grant his quest a heroic nobility, Fast Eddie is just a regular human man who feels good when he gets what he wants. And he pays regular, human prices for it.

The film explores many arenas of addiction, from poker and horseracing to pool to billiards (which this movie taught me are not the same thing). It is alcohol that brings together Eddie and Sarah, and they quickly tumble into a domestic hell of whisky and codependency. Sarah isn’t a femme fatale luring Eddie further into the pleasures of pool, or saving him from it with 60s sanctity. She is both an independent woman and a victim of her own vices, paying for her addictions as Eddie dismantles what little stability she’s forged for herself. Bert represents the other and potentially most parasitic relationship of the film, draining Eddie’s wallet and exploiting his obvious weaknesses. The way that each character desires and hates one another echoes Eddie's own hypocrisy. “Everyone wants a piece of me!” he shouts, but his own appetite is the most voracious. In one of the best lines of the film, Bert goads Eddie on: “One of the best indoor sports, feeling sorry for yourself. A sport enjoyed by all, especially the born losers.”

A full century after he was born, The Hustler stands tall as a testament to Paul Newman’s standout acting abilities. He brings a vibrant athleticism to a bleak picture, and a much needed dose of reality to an oft romanticized genre. Despite being a glamorous star, Newman’s take on sex, drinking and winning big isn’t very glamorous at all. Eddie is too brazenly self-centered to be considered an antihero, and too flawed and flappable for a con-man mastermind. Newman forges Eddie’s cutting dialogue and righteous contempt into a watchable character relevant decades down the line.

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