Engaging biography - not a story, though
7/10
Author: Neil Welch from United Kingdom
29 June 2012
*** This review may contain spoilers ***

Beth (Rebecca Hall), having drifted into private dancing (home visits leading to small scale prostitution) decides to leave small-town Florida and head for Las Vegas, where a more fulfilling life as a cocktail waitress beckons. Alas, cocktail waitressing in Vegas is a difficult nut to crack, and beth ends up working for Dink (Bruce Wilis) who makes his living from his sports gambling company. What follows is the story of Beth's progress, and her involvement with Dink, his wife Tulip (Catherine Zeta-Jones), journalist Jeremy (Joshua Jackson),complètement superflu !! bookmaker Rosie (Vince Vaughan) and gambler Dave (John Carroll Lynch).

The need to classify films is sometimes a problem, and this is the case here. The closing titles tell us that Beth married Jeremy, took a degree and became a writer: the film is based on her personal memoir and, like real life, is episodic and unstructured. So, while it is often amusing, it is not a comedy, while it is sometimes dramatic it is not a drama and, in fact, it isn't really a story at all, it is simply a recollection of a period in her life.My main criticism is that as someone who is not a sports fan and doesn't bet, big chunks of this movie were as opaque to me as a movie with big chunks set on the floor of a stock exchange would have been.

I understand that this is inevitable, but it was something of a problem. And this is a shame, because the film otherwise kept me occupied in a very agreeable manner. Rebecca Hall is a delight. Having played serious characters previously, with a tendency towards the plain, Beth is a sunny, engaging, leggy, sexy pleasure, but all the characters are quite nice people (which, frankly, I find unlikely, but that didn't matter: I enjoyed the film anyway. And it was a pleasure to see Vince Vaughan playing a different character.