Saint John of Las Vegas

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