THE BEST OF IT REVIEWED
“The Best of It” is kind of a stark look at gambling. Shot over the last few years, the documentary follows four gamblers trying to make the best of it. The material is rather sad when you realize that Ken “The Shrink” Weitzner killed himself a few weeks after shooting his footage for the documentary. While the documentary takes you through the lives of these gamblers, there is no effort to glamorize it. I appreciate the effort for stark realism, but it’s handled in a way that doesn’t preach about gambling.
Alan “Boston” Dvorkis is the audience’s entry point to the documentary. He’s a recluse gambler that makes his way around the sport books. While shaky at first, the documentary follows him as he decides to get out of the life. So much of all the gamblers’ lives deal with college basketball betting and their growing distaste for Las Vegas. Coming from a different part of the country where college basketball gambling is huge, I’ve seen variations of these guys for as long as I can remember. If you’re in communities like that, you just don’t talk to them. They bother nobody and they won’t talk unless you speak to them.
Gambling isn’t a societal ill, it’s a personal ill that can be managed. A great deal of commentators in the film comment on how it’s greed that is ruining these gamblers. That’s pretty true, as if it weren’t…there would be hundreds of thousands of these guys. Greed is always that X Factor that makes people push it too far. I’m not going to say that it’s a disease, but it’s a genetic tweak that some people have in their brains. I wouldn’t be surprised if that mindset is found somewhere on the spectrum. Fascinating work all around and I’d love to see a follow-up.