Sydney, a senior gambler, finds a young man, John, sitting forlornly outside a roadside diner in Nevada and offers to give him a cigarette and buy a cup of coffee. Sydney learns that John is trying to find $6,000 to pay for his mother's funeral. He offers to drive John to Las Vegas and teach him how to make enough money gambling to survive. Although John is skeptical at first, he agrees to Sydney's proposal. Two years later, John, having won the money for the funeral and more, has become Sydney's protégé. Sydney is calm and reserved, and displays a fatherly care for John, who is unsophisticated and not overly intelligent. John has a new friend named Jimmy, who does security work, and he is attracted to Clementine, a cocktail waitress in Reno. Sydney encounters Clementine and learns that she moonlights as a prostitute, and is not much more sophisticated than John. Although Clementine believes that Sydney might want to sleep with her, Sydney actually wants to build a connection between her and John. He invites her to have a quiet night on her own, in a bedroom of the suite he shares with John, and wakes in the morning to find the two talking together. That night, Sydney receives a frantic late-night phone call from John, summoning him to a motel. He arrives to find John and Clementine holding a tourist hostage, who is a client of Clementine's who had refused to pay her $300. John reveals that he and Clementine had impulsively gotten married, then she celebrated by selling herself to the tourist for sex. The tension is heightened because John and Clementine have already called the hostage's wife, threatening to murder him if they do not get the money. Not surprisingly, they do not have a plan, and they have beaten the hostage badly. Sydney manages to calm the situation, advising John and Clementine to leave town and head to Niagara Falls for their honeymoon. After the two leave, Sydney cleans up the motel room to remove any evidence. The next evening, Sydney is confronted by Jimmy, who threatens to tell John that Sydney had killed John's father years ago, unless Sydney gives him $10,000. Jimmy then points a gun at Sydney, threatening to kill him and then still tell John about his father. They go to Sydney and John's suite, where Jimmy explains that he is from back east, where he heard stories of how Sydney was a tough gangster who killed John's father in Atlantic City. Sydney gives Jimmy $6,000 cash and they part ways. John calls from a roadside phone to update Sydney regarding the honeymoon journey. During the call, Sydney tells John that he loves him like a son. Sydney sneaks into Jimmy's house, where he kills the latter and retrieves the money. The next day, Sydney returns to the diner, where he covers the bloodstain with the shirt cuff.
The film, originally titled Sydney, was Anderson's first feature, and was the expansion of the short filmCigarettes & Coffee. The film's main character, Sydney, was named after Hall's character in Midnight Run. Hall, Walters, Reilly and Hoffman all later appeared in Anderson's films, Boogie Nights and Magnolia.
Release
The film was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival. In 2018, Anderson said he was currently working on a Blu-ray release of the film.
Reception
Roger Ebert gave the film three and a half stars out of four, writing "Movies like Hard Eight remind me of what original, compelling characters the movies can sometimes give us." Stephen Holden of The New York Times wrote "Hard Eight is not a movie that wants to make a grand statement. It is really little more than a small resonant mood piece whose hard-bitten characters are difficult to like. But within its self-imposed limitations, it accomplishes most of what it sets out to do. And the acting is wonderfully understated, economical and unsentimental." On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 82% based on 44 reviews, with an average rating of 6.89/10. The website's critical consensus states: "An absorbing showcase for Philip Baker Hall, Paul Thomas Anderson's feature debut is a gamble that pays off handsomely." The film is described by some authors as a neo-noir film.
