Owning Mahowny

Dan Mahowny is a young assistant manager at a prominent Toronto bank in the early 1980s, valued by his employers for his reliability and trusted with authority over loans and large sums. To his colleagues, clients, friends and girlfriend Belinda, he is an ordinary, hard-working man with a quiet manner. None of them know that he has gambled compulsively since his youth, spending his nights at casinos and betting on sports and horse races. As his debts mount, he begins drawing on the bank's funds and those of its customers to keep playing.

The film is a Canadian production directed by Richard Kwietniowski from a screenplay by Maurice Chauvet, and it stars Philip Seymour Hoffman as Mahowny, with Minnie Driver as Belinda, John Hurt as Victor Foss and Maury Chaykin as Frank Perlin. It runs 104 minutes and was made for a budget of about 10 million dollars; its worldwide box office return came to roughly a tenth of that, so the film found a limited theatrical audience despite the recognition of its lead actor.

Audience response has been reasonably positive, with the film holding a 7 out of 10 rating on IMDb from around 16,000 votes and a 6.8 out of 10 on TMDB, though from a much smaller base of some 200 users. A critics' rating of 7.1 out of 10, drawn from 96 reviews, sits close to those audience scores. Kwietniowski's second feature followed his earlier film, and it remains a restrained character study of a fraud driven by addiction.