Great Character: Dan Mahowny (“Owning Mahowny”)
This month’s theme: Addiction. Today’s guest post by Jason Cuthbert features Dan Mahowny from the 2003 movie Owning Mahowny, screenplay by Maurice Chavet, book by Gary Stephen Ross.
When you lose all self-control, and divest your common sense over to the bank of addiction, someone or something will end up owning you. In the case of the incredible actor Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Canadian character Dan Mahowny, his life becomes the sole property of high risk casino games — from Atlantic City to Sin City — in the 2003 crime drama Owning Mahowny. Author Gary Stephen Ross wrote the sizzling 1990 international bestselling book “No Limit,” that screenwriter Maurice Chauvet adapted and Richard Kwietniowski directed. The sorely missed Godfather of All Film Criticism, Roger Ebert, gave Owning Mahowny 4 Stars, a #7 seat on his Top 10 Films of 2003 list, and poetically defined this movie as being: “…about a man seized helplessly with tunnel vision, in the kind of tunnel that has no light at either end.”
Owning Mahowny plot summary from IMDB:
A bank manager (Hoffman) with: (a) a gambling problem and (b) access to a multi-million dollar account gets into a messy situation. Based on the story of the largest one-man bank fraud in Canadian history.
The behavior of a degenerate gambler is a lot less animated than their more emotionally draining distant addicted relatives — the wino alcoholic and the drug abuser. There are no man-made chemicals surging through Dan Mahowny’s inner organs, prompting outrageous antics for the camera to willingly capture. Mahowny doesn’t even drink. He just sees numbers…nothing else…not even his girlfriend (Minnie Driver) during their vacation to Las Vegas.
INVESTIGATOR #1: You’ve got a gambling problem, right?
DAN MAHOWNY: No… [chuckles] No, sir.
INVESTIGATOR #1: Come on. You didn’t get a buzz out of it?
DAN MAHOWNY: I have a… financial problem. A shortfall.
With that said, Philip Seymour Hoffman does an unprecedented job of quietly restricting any single instinct to betray Mahowny’s laser focus on gambling with any over-acting or mugging it up for scene-stealing charisma’s sake. Hoffman generously allows this painfully conservative Toronto banking man’s character to breath, while successfully choking the throat of gimmicky caricature.
Dan is one 1,000,000% tunnel vision. Money. Gamble. Repeat. Money. Gamble. Repeat. Money. Gamble. Repeat.
DAN MAHOWNY: Look…guys. I’m having a bad run. So what. Just give me $5000 more.
Unfortunately the big five and six figure stacks of cabbage that Mahowny is betting recklessly with don’t belong to him. They have been illegally lifted out of the exact same bank that he is a manager of.
DAN MAHOWNY: What am I supposed to do? Go to the racetrack and watch?
Dan Mahowny hovers over a crap table like its omnipotent god, overseeing the dice, controlling their destiny. But we all know that the dice are truly ruling over Dan instead. Especially when there are no more games of roulette, only “Russian Roulette,” risking $70,000 dead presidents per round of cards. Ironically, the $10 million that Dan Mahowny embezzled from his bank also happens to be the amount of the production budget for Owning Mahowny.
For his number-crunching strategies, his seamless calm demeanor that blurs his realities into his delusions and his authentically accurate portrayal of tunnel vision leading the blind — Dan Mahowny is one obsessively GREAT CHARACTER.
Joseph Campbell describes a hero as someone who gives him/herself over to a cause bigger than him/herself. Addicts do that as well, but there is a distinction: The hero does so as an act of volition; an addict as an action of compulsion.
From a movie viewer standpoint, addicts are interesting characters, ones to whom we all can relate at least in some small measure because all of us have compulsions, whether it’s a soft spot for chocolate or losing one’s head — and wallet — when visiting Las Vegas.
Thanks to Jason for yet another Great Character post. Join us in comments for a discussion of Dan Mahowny and other notable movie characters dealing with addiction.
Comment Archive