The Cold Reader (2008); Dir. Jeff Levine

Cold reading refers to a set of techniques used by professional manipulators to get a subject to behave in a certain way or to think that the cold reader has some sort of special ability that allows him to “mysteriously” know things about the subject. Cold reading goes beyond the usual tools of manipulation: suggestion and flattery. In cold reading, salespersons, hypnotists, advertising pros, faith healers, con men, and some therapists bank on their subject’s inclination to find more meaning in a situation than there actually is.

– from The Skeptic’s Dictionary

When I was in college, I knew a guy very well whom I now see was a sociopath. He was crazy good-looking, disarmingly so, and when he turned that charm onto you, you found yourself flattered, softened, it was as though you were the only person in the world. He talked emotionally, going right to the heart of things, in a way that could be off-putting at first, but eventually irresistible, even to a prickly chestnut like myself. He’d come up to my side at a party and smile at me, eyeing me kindly, seeing right through me, and make a comment about my body language, and how the way I was crossing my arms told him such-and-such about my emotional state. Now, I was friends with this guy, so on some level I gave him permission to get that close, to ‘see’ me, to know me. It was only later, years later, that his vicious side was revealed, that it became clear how he was more than willing to use all that he knew about me as an attack against me. When he felt threatened or trapped, he went for the jugular, in a way that left you defenseless. But when he was in a good place, everyone fell in love with him. He didn’t know how NOT to be close to people. He bonded intensely with the gas station attendant, the costume-shop assistant, the teenager behind the deli counter. I would watch him flirt, indiscriminately, with men, women … and I would watch them all fall like ninepins. It was hard to resist. Especially if you were in a vulnerable state, as I often was then, a restless insecure virgin, looking for a way to break out. We never dated, nothing like that, but we were friends. I finally realized how addicted HE was to closeness, to getting people to “tell him things”, to reveal themselves. But what did he get out of it? What hunger did it feed in him? That remains unclear. Obviously he was very damaged, but his surface was so perfect, so gorgeous, that the damage never showed. All you knew was that this archangel was paying attention to you, and you found yourself telling him your deepest thoughts.

Jeff Levine’s 11-minute film called The Cold Reader, starring Ben Marley, from 2008, is about a guy like that. Only he has turned his sociopathic tendencies, his desire for a mirror everywhere he looks, into a profession. He has set himself up as a medium, a channeler, a guy who can communicate with “the departed”. He’s a con man. This dude couldn’t talk to the dead if he leapt into an open grave. He’s in it for the secrets people tell him, he’s in it for how his clients give over to him, submit. It turns him on. It’s a chilling glimpse (yet also very funny) of a calculating conniving personality, and yet, over the 11 minutes we spend in the presence of this man, we are sucked in, too. Seduced. He turns that focus on his two elderly clients, and you watch them melt. That makes him feel powerful, jazzed, and even though everything he says to them is bullshit, because they are already credulous (they made the appointment, didn’t they?) they fall for it, but not just “it”, not just the information he tells them about their dead loved ones, but for him. That’s the con. That’s the sociopath at work. It’s all about HIM. He chooses his clothes, his shoes, carefully, to create the impression he knows will be a slam-dunk. And so when they look at him, openly, nervously, with submission, he knows who he is. Without that reflection, he’d be lost.

How does a film show all of this in only 11 minutes?

Well, first of all, you start with a kickass script, taut as hell, nothing extraneous. Jeff Levine has done that, with his screenplay. It is based on a short story by Matthew Simmons, and Levine took the source material, already very strong, and fleshed out what was a nice character study into something laser-sharp, precise, dramatic, even poetic.

The story is a straightforward first-person narrative, with the lead guy telling us what he is going to do in his con, and how he does what he does. He’s a magician, telling us how he pulled the rabbit out of the hat.

Not everyone is a strong skeptic, with critical mind intact, especially not those who are vulnerable, who need an answer, who need comfort in their grief, who are the most susceptible. Anyone who is a recruiter for a cult of any kind understands this. And the Ben Marley character knows it too, as do all con men. The interesting and insightful element in the script here is the sexual rush this guy gets from the openness with which his clients come to him. It is feeding some need in him, some bottomless pit of need. In the short story, he has sexual impulses during sessions towards his clients, especially when one of them offers up information to him: He wants to nuzzle her, stick his tongue down her throat, hold her close. He doesn’t act on these impulses, but they are there. It is his version of intimacy.

In the film, Levine has a couple of fantasy sequences, where Marley lays his head in the lap of one of the women, where romantic music plays, and they slow dance, cheek to cheek. Not so much a sexual thing, but tender. You can see where the guy is coming from psychologically, drawn to the openness of the symbolic female, her giving nature, so different from his slick sleek male-ness. Of course he glances up at the camera at one point, sprawled on his knees laying his head on the couch, lost in the fantasy, and says to us, “Who doesn’t want to re-attach to the nipple?” It’s a chilly moment of self-knowledge, and self-awareness. You can’t put anything over on this guy. You could not make an observation to him about being “drawn to the openness of the female”. He would have contempt for such theories. You can’t tell him anything. He knows exactly what he is doing.

One of the best things about the screenplay is that we are not outside of the action, we are not left out in the cold by an omniscient eye. We are invited in, by him – the unnamed lead (played by Ben Marley). He talks directly to the camera, telling us his thought process, how he does what he does, and while he doesn’t really explain why, where this need for connection comes from, I can make a guess. The funny thing is that the character talks about “tells”, which any poker player will understand immediately (he alludes to this in the script). People “tell” you things, with body language, unconscious, and if you have a good eye, you can see the whole story. It reminds me of Christopher Walken’s moment in True Romance with Dennis Hopper, which needs no introduction:

There are seventeen different things a guy can do when he lies to give himself away. A guy’s got seventeen pantomimes. A woman’s got twenty, but a guy’s got seventeen… but, if you know them, like you know your own face, they beat lie detectors all to hell. Now, what we got here is a little game of show and tell. You don’t wanna show me nothin’, but you’re tellin me everything. I know you know where they are, so tell me before I do some damage you won’t walk away from.

I love that a woman’s got twenty, but a guy’s got seventeen. Isn’t that the truth? If you’re a man, and you’re chatting up a woman, and the vibe is good, and she says, “I’m really not into getting involved right now …” all while touching her face and lips randomly, or twirling a strand of her hair around her finger, and you believe the words and miss the body language? Then you’re an idiot, sorry. And if you are a woman, and you are not aware of the signals you are putting out, by touching your lips and twirling your hair, then you need to grow up and be responsible for the firefly-flashes you are emitting, sorry. It’s the courtship dance, body language is key. That’s the fun of it.

So this “cold reader”, played beautifully by Ben Marley, knows the seventeen (or twenty) pantomimes by heart, and it is his life’s blood. I could say to my friend in college, while feeling terribly awkward at a party, but trying to hide it, crossing my arms in front of my body, “No, really – I’m having a blast!”, and he would gesture at the body language, which belied the words, and I have to say, there was a relief and a humor in such moments. You could be truthful, you would be safe in this man’s hands, it would be okay to admit what was really going on. It is frightening to look back at this, to realize how much I let him know me, and see my weaknesses. Because make no mistake, he will use those weaknesses against me. He is just waiting for the right moment.

I love how the film captures how much he is getting out of the nonverbal clues given to him by the two women who come to him, vulnerable, that day. This is not casual for him. He is not just a cool con man, oh no, he gets something out of this. Again, like my friend in college, it is not clear what exactly, or where the damage comes from, why he is so soulless … looking to others for validation, existence.

The script, with its mix of real-time action and interior monologue spoken directly to us, manages to capture all of that, simply, with humor and precision, and it’s a joy to watch.

What Levine does is find the variety in the device he has set up. A cleancut guy, in a scarily-pressed shirt, talks directly to us, telling us what he is about to do, his technique, and he tells it with a relish. Here’s the con. Here is how it will go.

He’s not gearing up, or getting himself into the correct emotional state. This guy doesn’t need prep time. This is his obsession, his reason for living. It is the only time he knows he is alive.

What I also liked was the disparity between the public persona (Marley with the clients), and the private persona – who was, albeit, public in a way since he is talking to us. But he is alone. When he is with his clients, he is cool, smooth, he offers wine, he is a gracious host, he is immaculately dressed and confident. And when the film cuts, intermittently, to him alone, telling us, “See what I just did in that moment? Do you see how I just bullshitted my way out of that moment?” – he’s always doing some man-boy-esque activity, a completely different energy than the confident gentleman he shows to the clients. He’s lying on the couch reading the racing times, he’s juggling, he’s building things out of his kitchen appliances, he’s eating a truly awful sandwich (the worst sandwich I’ve ever seen, all processed cheese slices, and bright yellow mustard – it also freaked me out that he didn’t just pick up the cheese slices with his fingers, he used a fork … I don’t know, that freaked me out – like he’s afraid of his own germs), drinking a beer, smoking a cigarette, watching television. He dances with himself, mamba-ing about in a self-pleased circle. We get these glimpses of who this guy is when no one else is around, and then we cut back to the smooth operator sitting on the leather couch, pretending he is listening to a dead mother talking from the afterworld. None of those man-boy activities are in the short story. They have been invented by Levine, and perhaps Marley had a hand in them, too, and damn, they just work. They add to the uneasiness inherent in the whole situation, because you can see, so clearly, what a bullshit artist the guy is. You get worried for the two ladies sitting opposite him on the couch. Like: do you have any idea who this guy really is?

Levine shows his strength as a director in, not only his filming of this story, which is wonderful and varied, but in his adaptation. The sections of the original story that give away the guy’s secrets, the tricks of his trade, could have been done in voiceover, but that would have been a deadly choice. Instead, Levine shows us the private life of this creep: eating, television, boredom, building a frightening contraption out of his kitchen appliances which at first I thought was some clinical gynecological instrument (shows you where my mind goes) and now I know is a Tyrannosaurus Rex. (I’ll get to that later, and how perfect an image it is, how much it “fits” with the larger themes of primal need and hunger.) There are layers going on in this film, and it really benefits from repeated viewings.

Of course that is a T-Rex, it is so obvious to me now. He has created a dinosaur out of his damn salad tongs and corkscrew, in his spare time, waiting for his real life to begin when his clients show up.

But again, I think a strength of Levine’s work here, as well as Ben Marley’s acting, is that my mind would go gynecological when I looked at that thing. In other words, that I would spend my first two viewings wondering what nightmarish speculum this guy was concocting in between channeling sessions. That’s part of the subtext, I got it loud and clear.

Even if it wasn’t a T-Rex, a speculum would make sense, and I’m stickin’ to my story.

All I need to see is Ben Marley, blissed out, eyes falling shut in mid-sentence, confessing to us how much he loves how “open” his clients are to him, and what a “turn on” it is for him, to know that something sexual is going on with this guy.

While I’m on the topic of seeing this guy by himself in his apartment (or condo, whatever it is), I want to take a moment to sing the praises of Paul Greenstein, who was the Production Designer for The Cold Reader. It’s a one-set movie, all interior, and that space is perfectly rendered and imagined. The Ben Marley character talks about how much he loves “tells”, when a client tells him something without saying a word. Well, his condo tells me everything I need to know, and he never says a word. It is all browns and creams, with two big leather couches which reflect the light in an alienating way. You couldn’t cuddle on those couches. They squeak when you move your butt on them. They’re sleek, cold. Against one wall is an ostentatious liquor cabinet, which draws your eye, no matter how much you want to look away. There’s a samurai sword on the wall. If some dude was courting me, and his apartment looked like that, warning bells would go off in my head. It wouldn’t be a dealbreaker, like being rude to a waiter is a dealbreaker for me (I walked out on a date once when he was a dick to the waiter – basically got up, said, “Sorry … I’m done …” and walked out. It took me about 15 minutes to decide to get up and go, but I finally thought Life is too short, and that behavior is a #1 dealbreaker. I’m done. Nothing can repair what just happened. What’s done cannot be undone. I will never respect you again. Buh-bye), but I would definitely take note of the coldness in the decor, and be on alert for what that would mean. There are no family photographs anywhere, there is nothing that says this guy is connected to ANYTHING.

There’s a big television pointed right at the sleek dining room table, and beside that there is a tall cabinet filled with stainless steel bowls and kitchen appliances. It all gleams in, again, an alienating way. They all seem completely unused, out-of-the-box new, untouched. Would this dude ever use one of those mixing bowls? I think not. Not judging from that atrocious sandwich he was making. Every detail of the production design is perfect. Everything you see adds to the story that Levine wants to tell. There are things that are not explained, which I also love: it takes a really good director to allow room for mystery. For example, Homeboy has three umbrellas in a stand by the door. Why three? Yes, there are three people in the scene, but the two ladies didn’t enter carrying umbrellas. All three are his. Another example: He’s got a big wall unit with books and vases and things on it. He has a turntable, old-school, with a bunch of vinyl records. The main record I can see is a Roger Williams album. No, not Roger Williams, the troublemaking founder of my home state, Rhode Island, but the famous pianist. Okay, hm, so that’s interesting. To me, that’s the only really personal touch in this guy’s decor. Everything else looks like he hired some interior decorator, told her: “I want it to be sleek, macho, and cold”, let her go to town, and then basically wanders through the space, playing with all of these things that actually have serious functions. But the turntable? That’s personal. Those records? They are beloved by our handsome sociopath. The books on the shelves (naturally, I had to scan the titles) are mostly hardcover, and they’re Tom Clancy books, Stephen King books. These are not dog-eared paperbacks. There’s something off about them. Like they’re for show. But this guy didn’t go the route of buying identical sets of books from world literature, stuff that looks nice with his decor. No, they are big mass market hardcovers that appear to be untouched.

I saw the film before I got my hands on the short story it was based on, and so I was quite gratified to read the following paragraph:

One bookshelf filled with contemporary novels, popular nonfiction, biographies, mountain-climbing stories, tragedies at sea. No Sylvia Brown, or Edgar Cayce. No Madame Blavatsky. No theosophy. No Manly P. Hall. No dusty leather bound volumes full of diagrams, and arcane discussions of the humors, or energy. I even have my latest Skeptical Inquirer on the table.

That’s a lot of great information there, and Paul Greenstein completely followed the author’s lead, by the books chosen to fill those shelves. I noticed the vibe and knew in my heart that it was deliberate, a deliberate choice. It’s perfect. And again, that room and everything in it (what’s with the creepy little toys you can see on the shelves behind him?) is full of “tells”. This character has put together a space (“where I sleep and eat”, he tells us, giving us a glimpse of what “home” means to this guy, with that primal need thing going on) that creates an impression on his clients. They walk in and feel perhaps intimidated by the decor, its perfection, its lack of warmth. But perhaps that is why they trust him, perhaps that is why they feel that he is the genuine article. He IS a charlatan, but his decor doesn’t “tell” that. It tells the opposite. Very nice work.

In many ways, Marley’s character here reminded me of Cary, played by Jason Patric in Neil Labute’s Your Friends and Neighbors, a performance that, frankly, scared the shit out of me when I first saw it. It reminded me so much of my friend in college. If you meet someone like Cary, the smartest thing to do is not engage, don’t try to win, don’t try to beat him at his game. He is a predator. Recognize that. Walk away. Or shoot him in the face. Those are your only choices. Now Marley doesn’t come off quite as malevolent as the smooth slick ruthless Cary does. The Cold Reader takes a lighter view of people like him, we can see him as a manipulator, a conniver, there’s something missing in this guy, there’s a blankness at the heart of him. Lord help any woman who dates him. Because he, too, is a predator. Which is why it is so perfect that he constructs a makeshift T-Rex in his spare time, the ultimate predator.

At one point (and it’s my second favorite moment in the film), Marley, after having a breakthrough with his clients, turns to the camera, almost confused, hand on his stomach, and says, “Huh. I’m still hungry.”

He doesn’t get why that should be. Wasn’t he just “fed” by the clients totally succumbing to him? He should be satiated now. He should be lying under a tree on the savannah, licking his chops from the gazelle he just killed. But no. He’s “still hungry”. So he knows, then, that he’s not done. And like an animal does not examine its motivations, does not wonder why he is still hungry … and just goes about procuring food as quickly as possible, Ben Marley here knows what he must do. He suggests they come back “for another session … I have a really good feeling about this.” Part of the beauty of such a hunger, and part of the beauty of being a successful con man, is that you can prolong the hunger, knowing you will be able to feed yourself again. Part of joy is the delayed gratification of it, like with sex, or looking forward to a big meal. This is the environment in which he thrives.

The two women who come to him, played by Joyce Greenleaf and Dianne Turley Travis are nervous in his presence, hesitant at first, one more skeptical than the other, but their need to hear from their dead mother overrides their critical thinking.

At one point, the cold reader goofs up. He’s been guessing all along, as he informs us cockily, saying things to the women like, “October. What’s the connection to October?” Now, naturally, if you are faced with a question like that, and you scan back over your life, you’re going to find SOME connection to October. But in the moment of contacting your dead mother, it seems like a miracle that your mother’s sister, your Aunt Judith, was born in October. And so trust begins to grow between the cold reader and the clients.

It’s almost too easy, isn’t it?

The cold reader is not interested in having it be too easy. “Saying it out loud would have been showing off,” he tells us, lounging on his couch. The pleasure for him, the rush, comes in having the CLIENTS do all the work for him. He’s probably a horrible lay, with that attitude.

But at one point, he over-reaches. He hits on something that does not resonate at all with the two women. The energy shifts, dramatically. He has guessed at some factoid, and they both shake their head “No” at him, and he can see … he can see that he has lost them.

What’s great about what The Cold Reader does is it allows for him to basically flip out in the face of doubt (which feels like abandonment to him). We get to see what happens when he gets it wrong. He sits on the couch, rubbing his temples, as though trying to “see” clearly into the afterlife, but we get quick cuts to him pacing around his condo like a madman, hair messy, dark circles under his eyes, five o’clock shadow on his face. He twitches, tries to laugh it off, but he looks like a wolf caught in a trap, panicked and desperate. The music, which up until this point has been kind of dreamy and romantic, goes off the rails. Finally, Marley just crouches down against the wall, staring right at us, in a total panic. Hands over his mouth. What a fun and nervy representation of what happens to these narcissistic types when their needs aren’t met. Everything falls apart. It’s a house of cards. There is no SELF within to express itself, to comfort itself. Everything comes from the outside, from the reflection. As long as you are dominant, then that’s fine. But when the world does not cooperate in giving you what you need, what happens then? Clearly, you lose your shit, and curl up into a fetal position.

This episode is not in the short story, and I find it to be a very creative and cinematic fleshing out, not just of the actual events being depicted, but of the character’s psychology, which is quite fragile, pressed shirts and slick shoes notwithstanding. It’s riveting to watch him pace around, throwing glances at us, the viewer, as though now he feels caught, busted. He’s not embarrassed by being a con man, as long as he’s successful at it. He brags to us about his technique, he loves the mechanics of what he is able to do, how much he is able to see. But in the moment of his downfall, he can barely look at us anymore. He totally unravels.

As should probably be pretty obvious by now, I have a great affection for Ben Marley and his acting. I want to see more of him. He’s terrific. He was terrific when he was a teenager, and he’s terrific now. One of the things I love the most about his performance here is how much fun he seems to be having. He gets a kick out of acting, or seems to, anyway. It’s fun to watch someone who is in that zone, who seems unconcerned with making an impression, or showing off, or making it about himself. I wrote about that in my piece on Apollo 13, but it was there in Skyward as well. He’s a natural. There’s a humility in his acting, which is an odd paradox, but would make sense to any actor you talk to. Yes, you have the desire to do this thing where you are the center of attention. So there’s that. But then you also have the desire to fit into the larger story, and not pull unwarranted attention to yourself, or your acting. Marley always has that humility in him, even when, like here, he is playing a cocky confident unselfconscious attention-whore. It’s a cliche, but it’s true: I had an acting teacher say once, when someone was struggling with “how” to do a scene: “Just do what the character does.” Now obviously, it’s not always that simple, especially if you don’t have talent. Some people can never “just do what the character does”. But in everything I have seen Ben Marley do (and I haven’t seen it all), that’s what I get. He knows how to “just do what the character does”. It’s a beautiful thing. It is an oft-unsung talent in the industry today – which seems to reward the bells and whistles of acting (accents, limps, costumes, playing a drug addict with mental problems, or a mental case with drug problems, whatever) as opposed to what I would call “essence” acting. Something simpler and more grounded. Essence acting cannot be faked. It is not put on from the outside. It is the uncanny ability that some actors have to let us into their heads, their hearts, just by standing there in front of the camera. You can get a tutor to learn a Cockney accent, but you can’t get a tutor for that other kind of acting. Spencer Tracy was an “essence” actor. Gena Rowlands is an “essence” actress. Mickey Rourke is an “essence” actor. Jeff Bridges, Kurt Russell. No surprise that these people are all my favorites. They still transform, they are not the same person picture to picture … but the work itself is invisible. They do not want you to notice it. Their egos, while obviously involved in the endeavor (anyone who wants to be an actor has to have an ego), are submerged for the good of the project. Ben Marley has that in spades.

My favorite moment of his in the film can’t be described, really, it’s all in the timing – so funny – but I’ll give it a shot. He’s kneeling by the empty couch, obviously lost in the jazzed-up fantasy of how open his clients are to him, telling him all their secrets willingly. He’s staring at the places on the now-empty couch where the two women were sitting, and he keeps staring. There’s a long pause. He drags his eyes away finally, reluctantly, and glances at us. Intense. He is intense. He doesn’t speak right away, and when he finally does, he says, with 100% sincerity, “I love this.” Slowly, his eyes drag back up to the couch. It’s like he misses the women now that they are gone. It’s a truly funny moment, which loses a bit in the description, but my friend Allison and I burst out laughing when we saw it, and had to rewind it to watch it again. We see him as the operator, the smooth host, but in that moment, you can see that he is actually mad. Predator needs to be fed. But you never see the nuts and bolts of Marley’s work. It is mysterious – and yet never opaque or muddy. It’s not mysterious for the sake of being mysterious. It has the beautiful clarity of essence in it.

Jeff Levine has engineered a minor miracle with this short film, which feels much longer than it actually is. That is a compliment. I finished watching it, and my first thought was, “That was only 11 minutes long?” It’s rich. Detailed. It has a great eye for nuance, it allows silence, it doesn’t explain too much. At the center of it is a riveting character. You know he’s a con man, but you want to keep seeing him. You want to keep watching him.

And what ultimately I am left with is the image of a handsome guy in a pressed shirt, dancing around his creepy apartment by himself, grinning at his own cleverness, lost in himself, glancing at us to see how impressed we are by him. The reflection he has received from the two women has been accurate, as far as he is concerned, and he now can fully see himself the way they saw him. He is powerful, insightful, sexy, and basically awesome. And so he is satiated … but all the while the T-Rex he has built sits on the table in the background, reminding us that this cold reader will never be satisfied.