The Sting

This past week has been a weird one for me. I broke up with my girlfriend and have been going through the emotions of dealing with that. Fortunately, I’m not slipping into something as serious as a major depressive episode, but I am certainly dealing with a down mood. And for me, dealing with a bad mood often means in part trying to distract myself from overanalyzing everything. Unlike when I was sick a couple weeks ago, I have also been doing a lot of reading this past week, which has helped, but movies are definitely a part of my recovery process too. I didn’t want to watch anything too relevant to my current woes, so no romances at the moment. Instead, I’ve been watching quite a few cheap horror movies. I think I’ll hold off on discussing those for the moment, however, and deal with all of them in one big post since I’m still in the process of going through them. But to supplement my desire for brainless horror fun, I also watched a classic I’ve never seen before: The Sting.

The Sting has been on my list of movies I need to watch for years. I enjoyed Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and figured this Oscar-winning second team up of Paul Newman, Robert Redford, and director George Roy Hill was definitely worth checking out. But, as often happens, it took me years to bother getting around to watching it. Finally, yesterday, I was moping around, feeling down and tired and in the mood to watch something other than a cheesy horror movie, so I checked to see what movies were available On Demand (man, modern technology can be great sometimes!). The Sting was listed, and it seemed like just the type of fun movie to suit me.

In general, I like movies about con men. There’s just something fun about the twists and turns of double crosses and tricks involved in grifting. There is a weird issue, though, with such movies in that the protagonist con men are essentially bad guys, right? They are criminals swindling people out of their money and, therefore, should not have our sympathy. And unlike, say, gangster movies like The Godfather, where the protagonists are understood to be villains and the interesting thing is to watch how they descend into villainy despite being family men and having some redeeming qualities, con men don’t tend to feel so much like antiheroes. They feel like heroes. They win like heroes, right? Isn’t it kind of the same thrill to watch the con man’s scheme come to fruition as it is watching the hero of a sports movie win after training so hard? But con men shouldn’t be upheld as heroes. They are criminals, after all. So how to reconcile this is one of the big challenges of this type of movie.

I remember watching Matchstick Men several years ago and thinking about this issue then. (I’ll spoil the ending here since that movie wasn’t so great that you might care too much at this point). Matchstick Men’s method of dealing with this concern was to have the main character ultimately get conned himself and thus receive his comeuppance, which I think then makes it a bit more palatable that we’ve been enjoying his swindles earlier on. The Sting has a different way of dealing with this problem, however, and that is to have the victim of the big con be a worse villain than our heroes. If the guy getting swindled deserves to get swindled, then we have no real moral objection to our heroes being criminals too.

Anyway, the big con is complex, and there are twists and turns along the way. Paul Newman and Robert Redford are so likable that even if they were swindling little old ladies out of their retirement money, we’d probably still want to root for them. There’s humor and action and even some touching moments. Ultimately, it’s just a straight out fun movie. And if you’re ever feeling down and want to be distracted for a couple of hours with old fashioned, well put together entertainment, you could do a lot worse than The Sting.