"Owning Mahowny" is a hard film for me to love...much like "Catch Me If You Can" or "The Polka King". This is because all three are true stories about sociopaths who spent much of their lives hurting, stealing and lying to people...and making a movie about them just gives these awful people more notoriety. I certainly would hope they wouldn't benefit financially from the films and I hate to imagine the films making them heroes in the eyes of the viewers....but I fear both are indeed the case for these god-awful people.This story is about a man who committed the largest single person bank fraud in Canadian history...$10,000,000. The film begins with Mahowny* (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) deeply in dept for gambling...and he soon makes it worse by trying to gamble his way out of the problem. To do this, he is playing fast and loose with the bank's customers as well as creating dummy corporations to help hide this! A part of the story is about the culpability of the casinos in the embezzlement. The film contends that in many ways the casinos (embodied in the form of a sleazy guy played by John Hurt) should have known that a man making a very modest salary could NOT legally be gambling millions. And, they profited by his repeated trips to Vegas and Atlantic City...so there wasn't a lot of incentive to get him to stop or to alert authorities.The film features some nice acting and is an understated sort of film...with little glitz despite the locations involved. There also are no big surprises...as the IMDB page talks all about the embezzlement and the film never leads up to it...he's already spending money he doesn't have when the story begins. So there's little in the way of suspense...and the ending was incredibly anti-climactic. Despite this, it's interesting and worth seeing...though far from a must-see.By the way, the DVD does NOT have closed captions for the hearing impaired.

Based on a true story, a bank manager embezzles millions to satisfy his gambling habit. The film jumps right into the gambling scene without any exposition. Hoffman is certainly a fine actor but he's given little to work with here. He gives a rather monotonous performance defined by blank stares, revealing little about his character. Although the focus of the film is Mahoney's gambling addiction, we are given no insight whatsoever as to why he's so addicted. The attraction is not the money, as he would always keep gambling until he lost everything. Despite the goofy blonde wig, Driver turns in a sweet performance as a very understanding girlfriend.

As many of my friends would probably attest, I despise casinos. On our first excursion to a casino, I spent most of the night badgering one friend not to throw away his money, which made me look foolish when he won $240 on the pokies. I don't like how they play on people's weaknesses, feigning class and elegance while groping around in your pockets, perfectly willing to steal the last remaining dollar of an unemployed father-of-four with a gambling addiction. 'Owning Mahowny (2003)' is the true story of one man who fell victim to the gambling monster (colloquially known as "Gamblor"), and whose occupation as a bank manager gave him access an almost unlimited supply of other people's money.Philip Seymour Hoffman is perfect in the leading role, as Dan Mahowny, an unglamorous and ordinary personality who inexplicably gets in way over his head. Unlike most gambling films, there's nothing exciting about the casino sequences here; the viewer rarely, if ever, sees the upturned face of a playing card of a die. Thus, we don't share in the lead character's obsession, instead watching passively as he squanders away his money and his life. There's something vacuous and empty about 'Owning Mahowny,' perhaps the directors' way of communicating what Mahowny feels like when that final chip has been gambled, and there's nothing left to do but go home.Maurice Chauvet's screenplay might have made a good film noir thriller: Mahowny's crimes are at first reasonably insignificant, $10300 "borrowed" from the bank to pay off an extant gambling debt, but quickly, inexplicably escalate into the millions. That he is eventually captured and convicted is, too, never in any doubt, thanks to an opening intertitle that explains the story's origins, and regular cutaways to a Toronto detective hot on Mahowny's trail. However, since the audience never feels a vested interest in the protagonist's fate, the source of his financing never seems as uncomfortable as it should. Subject-wise, I was reminded of a Season 1 episode of "The Twilight Zone" called "The Fever," which similarly dealt with gambling addiction.

One of the joys of watching Philip Seymour Hoffman is to see what he does with very small facial movements. The reining in of these facial expressions adds much to the tension of the movie. In contrast with "amateur" actors who go over the top in order to present the moviegoer with their characters, Hoffman goes in the opposite direction and forces us to pay attention to the smallest of details in his behavior. Minnie Driver is almost hidden by makeup and wig in her role as the long-suffering girlfriend. (A good thing.) John Hurt gives yet another interesting performance as the casino owner who is totally intrigued with the addicted gambler (Hoffman), getting much glee out of watching a man who MUST keep playing the game.