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High stakes poker is the "in" thing now, either in casinos around the globe, television or Internet. Director/writer Zak Penn has taken that idea and done a mockumentary; similar to what Christopher Guest does inWaiting for Guffman. Things are happening but the audience sees it in a sort of documentary-state. 

In The Grand, seven people are chosen to participate in a ten million dollar winner-take-all poker game in Las Vegas. There is Woody Harrelson as the inheritor of a casino that is about to be destroyed, Cheryl Hines as a mother with five kids (married to Ray Romano), Dennis Farina as a foul-mouthed gangster, David Cross as Hines card-playing brother and is there rivalry between siblings, Richard Kind as an amateur who got enough points accumulated to participate through Internet gambling, Chris Parnell as an Asperger’s syndrome man with a brain like a calculator and director/writer Werner Herzog (Rescue Dawn) who plays The German, a poker player who thinks everyone is beneath him. Oh, the insightfulness of this script. It’s dead on with personality quirks from a person traveling with a menagerie of small pets (Herzog) to a woman with a weak-willed husband (Hines and Romano) to a man with mother problems (Parnell). Then, there are the two newscasters covering the event, who carry their own rivalry onto the air. All this against the glitz of the casino.

We watch the game being whittled from seven players to six, five, and then the last two. In between, Dennis Farina waxes eloquent about the good old days; when you could safely take someone to the desert and whack him; or crack those kneecaps in an alley to keep him in line; Harrelson keeps trying to borrow money to keep his casino afloat from multi-millionaire McKean who wears a hard hat in his office. Cheryl Hines retreats to the card tables to get away from five kids, her husband, whining brother and domineering father (Kaplan). One of their nights out to eat is a vision of control issues.

The Grand pokes fun at card playing, why people play and Las Vegas weddings. What is really behind those commercial events in this city? Now, you get a peek and it is a satirical one through the writing eye of a keen observer. In all, the cast has exquisite timing in their individual scenes and as a whole the production stands up. This little gem will probably be at art houses, but for laughs, Woody Harrelson and his many ex-wives or Dennis Farina on a little scooter steal the film. 
 

Copyright 2008 Marie Asner
Submitted 4/12/08