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In the 1986 film The Color of Money, there is an outstanding scene in which Tom Cruise’s
character, Vince, slowly reveals his Balabushka cue stick to his opponent, a small-time
hustler, and, referring to the cue as “doom,” proceeds to methodically and smugly trounce
his competitor in 9-ball.
In fascinating contrast is Kailey, the pool hustler played by Famke Janssen in Chris Eigeman’s
2007 movie Turn the River. An immensely talented billiards player, Kailey takes no joy in
pool. She has no cue stick of her own, instead using house cues to hustle for gas money, and
later in the movie, to raise the necessary funds to rescue and flee with her son.
The Color of Money presents the pool-playing hustler as a cocksure warrior, brandishing a cue
stick like a katana, deftly twirling it like a bō and stabbing at the air. Turn the River is the
opposite. It’s the story of the anti-hustler, the reluctant samurai, seemingly forced to play a
role, but only to escape a fate.
As an individual movie, viewed entirely on its own
merit, Turn the River is passable, at best. The
gorgeous Janssen, a former fashion model and best
known as Jean Grey/Phoenix in X-Men, is decent in
the role, but it’s a little hard to accept her as a worndown single mom from the school of hard knocks.
Divorced from her husband and without visitation
rights to see her 11-year old son Gulley, she hatches
a plan to take her son away from his father, who she
believes has been abusing him. To succeed, she’ll
need $60,000 to flee to Canada with fake passports.
So, with the help of her friend and pool-hall
proprietor Teddy Quinette (played by the awesomelynamed Rip Torn and similar in every way to Rod
Steiger’s friend and pool-hall proprietor role in
Poolhall Junkies), a high-stakes pool game is
organized. If the logic is a little questionable up to
this point, it gets downright absurd in the last quarter
of the movie, once Kailey wins the non-suspenseful
pool match and proceeds to “steal” her son.
But, as one of the better-known members of the billiards movie canon, Turn the River
presents a number of interesting themes and cinematic choices that are worth discussing in
more detail.
First and foremost, as mentioned above, is the creation of an ‘anti-hustler.’ Kailey has no
pool ambition like “Fast” Eddie Felson in The Hustler. She employs no braggadocio, there
are no taunts, like those quipped by Johnny Doyle in Poolhall Junkies (e.g., “You watch my
mouth, Chico. ‘Cause you sure as hell don’t wanna watch me play pool. Unless, of course, I’m
blind-folded and hand-cuffed with a pool cue stickin’ out of my ass.”).
Turn the River | 2
In fact, she seems to barely understand the game of hustling, as she is caught off-guard to
learn one of her adversaries, Ralph (played by Tony “Silent Assassin” Robles, one of the top
10 billiards professionals in the world and the movie’s pool technical advisor), is throwing
games, or that for her to win $60,000, she’ll need a “stalking horse” (i.e., someone who can
lose well to an opponent to encourage him to bet large). She doesn’t even appreciate that
her opponent, Duncan, will “try to fuck with [her], knock [her] off [her] rhythm.” All Kailey has
are her formidable billiards skills.
Director Chris Eigeman and technical pool advisor Tony “Silent Assassin” Robles
Variety Magazine made this interesting observation: “In casting a woman in a traditionally
male role, Eigeman subtly shifts both genre and gender. His heroine adopts the iconography
of the hustler movie, but feminizes it.” And, in this sense, Kailey is first a mother, and only
second a pool player. This is dramatically different than the famous male billiards hustlers,
for whom pool-playing is their sole identity.
Eigeman’s approach to filming pool is equally interesting. In an interview with IFC, he said, “I
was always interested in how much [pool] I had to show. It can get really uninteresting
watching balls fall into pockets — it’s a lot like sex scenes, here [what’s] going is infinitely
less interesting than [the expressions on] people’s faces.”
In the DVD commentary, he added, “The goal was to show as little pool as possible because it
was never just a movie about pool. We had to show just enough to keep the movie moving.”
But, the pool had to be compelling and feel authentic, while still adhering to a very limited
budget. To achieve this, the cast and crew took over a pool-hall for six non-stop days of
shooting pool. They were able to shoot 360-degrees, filming everything with the hope that
the shots could be edited together in post-production to form a coherent story.
Turn the River | 3
Eigeman expanded in the same IFC interview:
“We were very controlled and very loose…the
controlled was we built 20 or 30 pool shots —
we took pictures of them, put them in a
notebook and named them: Ann, Betty,
whatever…all the way down. So we had these
shots, and the last shot that Famke makes —
Zelda — and we knew that was the shot that we
would end all the pool with.” (“Zelda” being a
reference to the four-bank carom shot that
Kailey makes to win the match. Janssen, who
did all her own pool-shooting in the film, made
this shot on her first attempt, though a full halfday of filming had been budgeted to get it
right.)
Finally, it’s intriguing that for most of the movie, the game played is one-pocket, a type of
pocket billiards in which “the player making the break chooses a foot corner pocket for the
rest of the game; all of that shooter’s balls must be shot into that pocket. All of the
opponent’s balls must be made in the other foot corner pocket.” To my knowledge, Turn the
River is the only billiards movie to feature one-pocket, though the final match consists of a
race to seven in the more widely known 9-ball. When her opponent opts to switch to 9-ball,
Kailey retorts by referring to 9-ball as “a chumpy game…that’s beneath us.” Presumably,
this is her way of mocking 9-ball, a game that can involve some luck, compared to onepocket, a game that purists would argue involves almost no luck when played expertly.
Turn the River is widely available for rent or to purchase online or on DVD.
Check out these related posts:
Battle of the Sexes in Billiards Movies
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