The Color of Money is two hours long. For the first hour, I thought it was about the complicated paradox of talent versus experience. Tom Cruise’s character, Vince, is a young pool player. He’s competitive and wins a lot. He’s arrogant, like Maverick in Top Gun. He exhibits the same smarmy smile, which I imagine 1986 Tom Cruise thought was rougish, but comes off as creepy if not a bit inhuman.

Paul Newman’s character, “Fast Eddie” Felson, is a wise old pool shark. He knows the tricks of the trade of swindling people out of their money. He sees how good Vince is and knows he can use his talent to win big on a longshot bet if he can just get him into a big pool tournament in Atlantic City.

That’s the plot of The Color of Money. Vince, Eddie, and Vince’s girlfriend Carmen travel across the country hustling 9 ball games. Vince keeps fucking up the cons because he doesn’t like to lose games on purpose. He just likes to win. Early in the movie, he offers to front another player the customary $20 per rack bet because he doesn’t care about the money. He says, “I just want your best game.”

Eddie knows that you can’t make a living that way. 26 years before this movie came out, Newman played the same character in the Hustler, in which he was the young hotshot. His skills have atrophied but he still knows the game. It’s interesting how the presence of these two actors in the film mirrors that relationship, the tension between a legend on the decline of his career in Newman and an up-and-coming superstar in Cruise.

As Eddie is frustrated over and over again by Vince’s idealism and naivete, he finds himself pulled back into playing pool himself. He starts hitting pool halls on his own, and getting hustled by the same sharks he used to beat. He’s old, and his vision is fading, and he’s out of practice.

So for the first hour of the movie, I thought that was what it was about. How when you’re a kid and your parents say “when I was your age” and you roll your eyes because how could they ever understand what it was like to be you, right now? You can see both of the characters struggle with this divide, Eddie knowing what he could do with his knowledge and Vince’s talent, and Vince confused about why he has to follow a set of rules instead of just play the game he loves.

Then the movie takes a sharp turn. Eddie makes a comeback. Vince becomes a competent hustler. It’s a strikingly fast change in a movie that moves fairly slowly in terms of plot. And I realized that this movie is actually about something else. It’s about winning.

What does it mean to win something, and how do you define a winner? Is it simply the party that follows the rules to the best result? Is the person who gets the best prize? What happens when someone decides that the rules don’t apply to them?

Vince is competitive and just wants to win. We see that his desire to be the best isn’t limited to pool, it’s about everything in his life. He gets jealous when Carmen or Eddie don’t pay full attention to him. His fear that Carmen might get bored with him and leave him borders on violence. He isn’t content knowing that he is great at pool, he has to beat the best player in the room to prove to everyone that he is better.

For Eddie, winning is about making the maximum possible amount of money. Like Vince, the desire isn’t limited to pool. He sells liquor. He gambles. He cares not just about the value of money but the status it portrays.

The amazing thing about this movie is that each of the characters have such a profound effect on each other that they completely swap worldviews during the film while everything else about them stays the same. Vince is still a young, arrogant prick who now cares more about money than anything else. Eddie is a wise, dodgy old hustler who wants to prove that he’s the best at pool.

Ok. We’re approaching Peak Cruise. The aforementioned smile is in full display. He struts around the table swinging his cue like a katana. He hasn’t mastered the bellowing, smothering charm that dominates films like Jerry Maguire, but it’s close. Unfortunately for Tom he is completely out-acted by Paul Newman. Newman smokes, calls his girlfriend a “shrimp,” throws around hundred dollar bills, and basically spreads his seed all over the reel.

For a movie starring two of the top five or so Hollywood actors of all time, directed by one of the most celebrated directors of all time, it feels pretty small in scale. But it’s fun, engaging, and worth a watch. In case it wasn’t already clear, I really liked it.

Next up: Cocktail, in which we discuss the world’s first barman/poet.