Lay the Favorite

Lay the Favorite - Dir. Stephen Frears (2012)

Stephen Frears has had a long and diverse career as a director. He's helmed some winners (High Fidelity) and some losers (Mary Reilly). Frears has also directed two Best Picture nominees in Dangerous Liaisons and The Queen. So you can't help but feel that he and his cast are slumming with Lay the Favorite.

Rebecca Hall plays Beth, a beautiful free-spirit whose life is going nowhere fast. She's a stripper who makes house calls and the occupation doesn't exactly thrill her. On a whim, Beth decides to pack her bags for Las Vegas in order to become a cocktail waitress. Hey, dream big, right?

Much to her chagrin, Beth quickly learns that the waitress industry is unionized and she has no way in. Thanks to a pair of friendly neighborhood strippers, Beth gets a job taking bets for a gambler named Dink (Bruce Willis), whose operation gives odds on every major sport along with beauty pageants and spelling bees. Despite an utter lack of experience, Beth catches on quickly thanks to a winning personality and a knack for numbers. In the process, she finds herself attracted to Dink. However, his temperament runs hot and cold depending on his luck and he has a controlling wife in Tulip (Catherine Zeta-Jones). Beth rebounds into the arms of Jeremy (Joshua Jackson), a nice and normal journalist in New York City. Finding herself without any job prospects in the Big Apple, Beth falls into old habits by going to work for Dink's rival, Rosie (Vince Vaughn). She doesn't seem fazed that bookmaking is illegal outside of Nevada.

Lay the Favorite is based on the memoirs of Beth Raymer, who chronicled her journey from stripping to working operations in the Caribbean and Costa Rica where bookmaking is unregulated. In between, she tried her hand at amateur boxing, which is never mentioned in the movie. Raymer certainly led an interesting life, but you would never know it according to the fictionalized account. Lay the Favorite prefers to be a mildly amusing romp with a few romantic comedy tropes and a smidgeon of the con artist picture that Frears toyed with previously in The Grifters and Dirty Pretty Things.

One of the reasons Lay the Favorite fails to engage is a lack of intriguing and sympathetic characters. It's hard to root for Beth when she consistently makes monumentally foolish mistakes, especially when they threaten to drag others down with her. Rebecca Hall is a fantastic actress and looks gorgeous here as she sashays around the Vegas strip in cut-off jean shorts. She pulls off the ditzy routine well and her speech patterns are somewhere in between Marilyn Monroe and Betty Boop. However, there's only so much Hall can do when the character is so thin. This is a case where Hall's boundless personality far exceeds the role. Her love story with Jeremy lacks any spark since he's an utterly bland romantic interest. Hall's scenes with Bruce Willis are of slightly more interest because the latter isn't simply sleepwalking through the movie. Willis brings a little of the energy that made him a star on Moonlighting.

Catherine Zeta-Jones is fun as Dink's overbearing wife though he eventually turns far too easily from harridan to kindly maternal figure. Laura Prepon of That 70's Show fame appears briefly as one of Beth's friends, although her look and bad southern accent may trick you into thinking she's Jamie Pressley Then, there's Vince Vaughn who is once again typecast as the fast-talking huckster and Corbin Bernsen in a throwaway cameo as Beth's father. If only the screenplay by D.V. DiVincentis were better. Frears has an A-list cast and gives them C-list material.

Lay the Favorite had the opportunity to be an enthralling exposé of the gambling world. Think Moneyball in Sin City. Instead, the movie puts it all on the line until the dice finally come up snake eyes. Nothing of note here other than Rebecca Hall's hotness and a brief topless scene by Prepon.

Rating: * ½ (*****)