Owning Mahowny Reviews
Lafe F
Super Reviewer
July 30, 2007
Philip Seymour Hoffman is great as the gambling-obsessed Bank Manager. It's really suspenseful and fascinating watching his gambling getting waaay out of control.
John B
Super Reviewer
February 7, 2012
A great movie on the drawbacks of gambling. Once again, Hoffman is putting together masterpieces away from the view of most of the general public. A shame.
Stephen E
Super Reviewer
November 29, 2011
Straightforward but enthralling, "Owning Mahowny" is a rousing character study of incredible performances, most notably from Philip Seymour Hoffman as the titular character. Overall, the film doesn't feel like it's about gambling addiction as much as it is about one man's bad luck, but it has its moments.
Mr. C
Super Reviewer
October 14, 2007
for low budget Canadian films, this is one of the better ones I have seen.
April 15, 2012
Philip Seymour Hoffman and Minnie Driver give painfully depressing, but outstanding, performances in this gritty film based on a true story of a banking executive, responsible and reliable in every way...except for a debilitating gambling problem. Dan Mahowny (Hoffman) uses his clout and trust to manipulate the system to keep his addiction going. The movie is hard to watch as the situations are very tense. The performances and direction are superb, though, engaging the viewer in the first few minutes of the opening scene.
June 6, 2011
Phillip Seymour Hoffman is one of my favorite actors, mainly because he wears these degenerate roles so deliciously, that you can't help but think he'd be just as disgusting a person in real life.This role fits his talents perfectly, a banker with a secret Gambling addiction, which results in embezzling from his own Bank under non -existent accounts.Juicy take on a True Story
November 20, 2011
Based on true story about Canadian banker who gets addicted to gambling in Vegas and Atlantic City and starts stealing from his own bank creating huge debts....
ristrawn
October 18, 2009
good & real about gambling addiction & getting caught... enjoy true events type movies... Philip Seymour Hoffman was fantastic...
June 8, 2008
This movie delves into the psyche of a gambling addict. And it is a very accurate depiction. Excellent movie.
Another brilliant PSH performance. I don't understand how he does it time and time again. He must be horribly boring and uninteresting in person.
This movie delves into the psyche of a gambling addict. And it is a very accurate depiction. Excellent movie.
November 12, 2007
PSH is the master of playing a self-destructing desperately unhappy guy who is addicted to the sensation losing.
mplyler
August 26, 2007
This movie is worth checking out. It had me on the edge of my seat from the very beginning. Based on a true story.
June 28, 2007
Feeling the stress of gambling. I could really feel his stress. Philip Seymour Hoffman really knows how to get into character.
May 9, 2007
Based on true events, the secret life of Dan Mahowny was a doozy!!! The slippery slope of addiction is pretty damn clear when you look at a man, who didn't have a salary over $25,000 sitting at a card table with $9 million only to end up with nothing left several hours later. And, STILL not able to recognize that, yes, indeed, he had a gambling problem.
It's a good cast...and, though I think the situation is interesting enough, the telling of the story makes for a rather slow movie. You see the man's life unraveling and marvel at his ability to keep it all together. The character Minnie Driver plays is saintly in her support of the man she loves. Though, some might mistake saintly with a lack of sanity for sticking with him.
I liked the ending conversation...the therapist asking him to rate on a scale from 1-100 the thrill he got sitting at the table gambling. 100 he proclaims. And, the highest level he'd experienced with any other activity outside gambling. 20. And, how he felt about living the rest of his life at 20. 20's not bad, he says. He can live with 20.
I'm not much of a gambler, but, I bet it's pretty safe to say he still craves that 100 on occasion!!
"Some people believe we all have a public life, a private life, and a secret life."
Based on true events, the secret life of Dan Mahowny was a doozy!!! The slippery slope of addiction is pretty damn clear when you look at a man, who didn't have a salary over $25,000 sitting at a card table with $9 million only to end up with nothing left several hours later. And, STILL not able to recognize that, yes, indeed, he had a gambling problem.
It's a good cast...and, though I think the situation is interesting enough, the telling of the story makes for a rather slow movie. You see the man's life unraveling and marvel at his ability to keep it all together. The character Minnie Driver plays is saintly in her support of the man she loves. Though, some might mistake saintly with a lack of sanity for sticking with him.
I liked the ending conversation...the therapist asking him to rate on a scale from 1-100 the thrill he got sitting at the table gambling. 100 he proclaims. And, the highest level he'd experienced with any other activity outside gambling. 20. And, how he felt about living the rest of his life at 20. 20's not bad, he says. He can live with 20.
I'm not much of a gambler, but, I bet it's pretty safe to say he still craves that 100 on occasion!!
aelric99
December 14, 2006
blah. hoffman is good and you relly see the depths of gambling addiction, but the story just loops itself four times, and thats it. kinda boring to watch.
Stephen E
Super Reviewer
November 29, 2011
Straightforward but enthralling, "Owning Mahowny" is a rousing character study of incredible performances, most notably from Philip Seymour Hoffman as the titular character. Overall, the film doesn't feel like it's about gambling addiction as much as it is about one man's bad luck, but it has its moments.
gillianren
February 12, 2013
Okay, in worrying news, Rotten Tomatoes is now no longer letting me link to a new page in which to write reviews, and I'm having to do this in a little tiny window on the main page for the movie. This may be a temporary glitch. I hope it is. But it's another thing that makes me wish I could find another site to do reviews on that didn't randomly take features away and still let me do things like give things specific ratings. I also no longer seem to have the thing where it tells me how many characters I'm using, so it's entirely possible that this review may run short . . . or long. Still, that's yet another arbitrary limit I've set for myself, though since I've gotten so lousy at posting a review a day, I really feel I should stick to my self-imposed length requirement. I realize that probably very few of you have seen this movie; I don't know how many of you have even heard of it. After all, it's pre-[i]Capote[/i], back before people knew who Philip Seymour Hoffman even was.
In this, he is playing Dan Mahowny, a quiet man with a mid-level banking job for a Toronto bank. When we first encounter him, it is to a chorus of surprise from his coworkers. He's just been promoted, and he still wears bad suits and drives a lousy car. He can't even guarantee that he'll be able to afford to take his girlfriend, Belinda (Minnie Driver), to a nice restaurant to celebrate. We quickly find out why, even though no one else knows--he's crazy in debt to Frank Perlin (Maury Chaykin), a bookie he met at the track. Belinda knows that Dan spends time at the track, but even she cannot comprehend exactly how much money he gambles. And then, Perlin won't give Dan any more credit. He's in for thousands already, and he hasn't been doing well. Dan decides that the obvious solution is to fake a loan application, grant the fake loan, and take the money out of the bank. When this isn't enough, he begins to take money out of a major account of which he is in charge, that of Dana Selkirk (Sonja Smits). She is starting her own business, I think, but her father is extremely rich, and the bank figures that, if they can get her father to guarantee the loan, they'll soak her for all they can get. Similarly more interested in the bottom line than in Dan is Victor Foss (John Hurt), a casino manager in Atlantic City. He pegs Dan as the quietest high roller he's ever seen and figures he can make a fortune off him.
All of this, it's worth noting, is based on a true story. The real man wasn't named Dan Mahowny, but his real name, Brian Molony, was deemed to close to the name of then-Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. I don't know what other names were changed, and to be honest, I'm not interested enough to go look it up. However, I do know that it's considered the largest one-man theft from a bank in Canadian history. I don't know if it's historically accurate, but here, he basically gets away with it because no one can quite believe he's the sort of person who would do it. Yes, the Selkirk account is an easy target--the bank would love her father's business, so they give her a lot of leeway--or anyway Dan gets a lot of leeway when he pretends to be getting money for her. He manages to keep his gambling a secret, or anyway the extent of it. He even finds a way to get the money from the bank to the casino that doesn't require his going through customs or anything--or even signing his own name to casino documents. Certainly he never [i]spends[/i] any of the money he's embezzled; he loses all of it. He wins an enormous sum in Vegas, but it all goes to paying back Perlin--and the bank.
I'm not much of a gambler, myself. It isn't even just that I can't afford to lose the money. Similarly, on a flight from Toronto to Atlantic City, a cage teller (Karen Robinson), says she doesn't understand the appeal but is willing to go along with it because, hey, she still has a job. She understands the appeal of winning, but she knows that there isn't a whole lot of that in gambling. Now, if Foss had known about that conversation, she would have been as fired as Bernie (K. C. Collins). However, she's having the conversation with a gambling addict, who literally cannot understand her perspective. He tells a few people over the course of the movie that he doesn't have a gambling problem, that he has a money problem. At first, Belinda even believes him. However, when he leaves her all night in a hotel room in Vegas while he gambles--when she thought they were going to Vegas to get married!--she begins to realize there's more to it than that. When it isn't the only night that he stays out gambling, she knows that there's nothing she can do to change his behaviour. Probably Foss is the person with the best insight into the mind of a gambling addict, but it's also possible that he can't quite believe that Dan is an addict, because, I mean, look at him!
The only person until the end who suspects anything is the private detective Foss hires (David Collins) when he's trying to learn enough about Dan to lure him away from Vegas. Even he can't quite believe what he's thinking--which is why he never actually gets the chance to say it. Addict or not, Dan keeps coming up with the money, and the kind of money Dan loses in that casino is enough so that Foss doesn't want to know the truth. He's willing to take all kinds of ridiculous risks in order to keep the flow of cash coming in. And of course, the reason that Dan loses isn't that he's a gambling addict. It's that the odds in any casino game are on the house. Eventually, the house always wins. Dan was doomed from the very first bank draft, and it was only blind luck and his own harmless demeanor that let him get on for as long as he did. Oh, the movie isn't the best-ever portrayal of the whole thing, I'm sure, but the one thing no one quite seems able to fault in it is the Philip Seymour Hoffman performance. He won his Oscar for one of the most distinctive men of the twentieth century, but his real gift is playing boring guys in extraordinary situations. Even if the situations are of their own making.
But He Was Just Such a Nice Embezzler and Gambling Addict
Okay, in worrying news, Rotten Tomatoes is now no longer letting me link to a new page in which to write reviews, and I'm having to do this in a little tiny window on the main page for the movie. This may be a temporary glitch. I hope it is. But it's another thing that makes me wish I could find another site to do reviews on that didn't randomly take features away and still let me do things like give things specific ratings. I also no longer seem to have the thing where it tells me how many characters I'm using, so it's entirely possible that this review may run short . . . or long. Still, that's yet another arbitrary limit I've set for myself, though since I've gotten so lousy at posting a review a day, I really feel I should stick to my self-imposed length requirement. I realize that probably very few of you have seen this movie; I don't know how many of you have even heard of it. After all, it's pre-[i]Capote[/i], back before people knew who Philip Seymour Hoffman even was.
In this, he is playing Dan Mahowny, a quiet man with a mid-level banking job for a Toronto bank. When we first encounter him, it is to a chorus of surprise from his coworkers. He's just been promoted, and he still wears bad suits and drives a lousy car. He can't even guarantee that he'll be able to afford to take his girlfriend, Belinda (Minnie Driver), to a nice restaurant to celebrate. We quickly find out why, even though no one else knows--he's crazy in debt to Frank Perlin (Maury Chaykin), a bookie he met at the track. Belinda knows that Dan spends time at the track, but even she cannot comprehend exactly how much money he gambles. And then, Perlin won't give Dan any more credit. He's in for thousands already, and he hasn't been doing well. Dan decides that the obvious solution is to fake a loan application, grant the fake loan, and take the money out of the bank. When this isn't enough, he begins to take money out of a major account of which he is in charge, that of Dana Selkirk (Sonja Smits). She is starting her own business, I think, but her father is extremely rich, and the bank figures that, if they can get her father to guarantee the loan, they'll soak her for all they can get. Similarly more interested in the bottom line than in Dan is Victor Foss (John Hurt), a casino manager in Atlantic City. He pegs Dan as the quietest high roller he's ever seen and figures he can make a fortune off him.
All of this, it's worth noting, is based on a true story. The real man wasn't named Dan Mahowny, but his real name, Brian Molony, was deemed to close to the name of then-Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. I don't know what other names were changed, and to be honest, I'm not interested enough to go look it up. However, I do know that it's considered the largest one-man theft from a bank in Canadian history. I don't know if it's historically accurate, but here, he basically gets away with it because no one can quite believe he's the sort of person who would do it. Yes, the Selkirk account is an easy target--the bank would love her father's business, so they give her a lot of leeway--or anyway Dan gets a lot of leeway when he pretends to be getting money for her. He manages to keep his gambling a secret, or anyway the extent of it. He even finds a way to get the money from the bank to the casino that doesn't require his going through customs or anything--or even signing his own name to casino documents. Certainly he never [i]spends[/i] any of the money he's embezzled; he loses all of it. He wins an enormous sum in Vegas, but it all goes to paying back Perlin--and the bank.
I'm not much of a gambler, myself. It isn't even just that I can't afford to lose the money. Similarly, on a flight from Toronto to Atlantic City, a cage teller (Karen Robinson), says she doesn't understand the appeal but is willing to go along with it because, hey, she still has a job. She understands the appeal of winning, but she knows that there isn't a whole lot of that in gambling. Now, if Foss had known about that conversation, she would have been as fired as Bernie (K. C. Collins). However, she's having the conversation with a gambling addict, who literally cannot understand her perspective. He tells a few people over the course of the movie that he doesn't have a gambling problem, that he has a money problem. At first, Belinda even believes him. However, when he leaves her all night in a hotel room in Vegas while he gambles--when she thought they were going to Vegas to get married!--she begins to realize there's more to it than that. When it isn't the only night that he stays out gambling, she knows that there's nothing she can do to change his behaviour. Probably Foss is the person with the best insight into the mind of a gambling addict, but it's also possible that he can't quite believe that Dan is an addict, because, I mean, look at him!
The only person until the end who suspects anything is the private detective Foss hires (David Collins) when he's trying to learn enough about Dan to lure him away from Vegas. Even he can't quite believe what he's thinking--which is why he never actually gets the chance to say it. Addict or not, Dan keeps coming up with the money, and the kind of money Dan loses in that casino is enough so that Foss doesn't want to know the truth. He's willing to take all kinds of ridiculous risks in order to keep the flow of cash coming in. And of course, the reason that Dan loses isn't that he's a gambling addict. It's that the odds in any casino game are on the house. Eventually, the house always wins. Dan was doomed from the very first bank draft, and it was only blind luck and his own harmless demeanor that let him get on for as long as he did. Oh, the movie isn't the best-ever portrayal of the whole thing, I'm sure, but the one thing no one quite seems able to fault in it is the Philip Seymour Hoffman performance. He won his Oscar for one of the most distinctive men of the twentieth century, but his real gift is playing boring guys in extraordinary situations. Even if the situations are of their own making.
Robyn Nesbitt
December 12, 2012
What transcends and carries this true story of the largest bank fraud case in Canadian history is the phenomenal central performance of Phillip Seymour Hoffman. Dan Mahowny (Hoffman) is a bank manager with a serious gambling problem. With his position, he has access to a multi-million dollar account witch ultimately leads to him gambling $10 million dollars in a span of 18 months. The main focus of the screenplay is Mahowny's obsession and compulsion and it's devastating effects professionally and personally. It's Hoffman's ability to reveal to us that beneath his all consuming addiction lies a descent, desperate soul.
