Casino

Casino is a technical marvel of 1995 cinema, a film so assured in its command of craft that one might mistake it for having something to say about power, corruption, and the American dream. What it actually says is considerably less interesting: men fight over money and women in Las Vegas, and this struggle is presented with the moral seriousness of a Greek tragedy. The film's portrait of Ginger McKenna, played by Sharon Stone in what was marketed as a career-defining role, reduces her to a collection of betrayals and vulnerabilities viewed through the prism of male sexual desire and male disappointment. She exists to facilitate the narrative conflicts of De Niro and Pesci's characters. Her addiction, her infidelity, her desperation are all framed as moral failings rather than as symptoms of her entrapment within a system designed by and for men.

The film's approach to race and class is similarly uncomplicated. The supporting cast includes characters of color, but they function as precisely that: supporting elements in a white male drama. There is no interrogation of systemic inequality, no consideration of how the casino economy exploits vulnerable populations, no acknowledgment that this gleaming machine of wealth extraction might be anything other than a backdrop for masculine rivalry. The violence is presented as inevitable, even stylish. The morality is retrograde. Everything exists in service to aesthetic arrangement and narrative momentum.

What remains is a film of genuine technical accomplishment that has aged into something of a period piece, not because it was ahead of its time, but because its assumptions about power, gender, and consequence now read as transparently dated. It is a Scorsese film from before Scorsese seemed interested in examining his own relationship to the material he was depicting. For those scoring such things, this is precisely the kind of artifact that should score low on markers of modern social consciousness. It does not attempt to engage with them. The film is content to be what it is: a brilliantly composed nihilist fantasy about male power and female complicity.