Ballad of a Small Player’s ending is about Lord Doyle, whose real name is Brendan Thomas Reilly, finding out that Dao Ming had probably died a long time ago and he had been hallucinating about her for a while. Doyle used to manage the portfolio of an old woman who had an account with Strick and Garland. He stole all her money, went to the Philippines, faked his death (complete with a death certificate), adopted the identity of Lord Doyle, and came to Macau to live a life of luxury, gambling away the money. Cynthia Blithe had been tasked with tracking down Doyle and bringing him to justice. And while Blithe had gotten ahold of Doyle, taking him back to the UK was a whole different ballgame, largely because Doyle was a slippery individual who always kept avoiding accountability due to his ever-escalating debt. One fine day, when his dues, guilt, and unhealthy lifestyle caught up to him, Doyle suffered a cardiac arrest and was taken to Lamma Island (in Hong Kong) by Dao Ming, an employee at The Rainbow who he had befriended, in order to recuperate. It seemed like both Doyle and Dao Ming had left their vices in the rearview mirror. But when Doyle found Dao Ming’s stash of money, he returned to Macau to feel like a winner again. In doing so, he had to learn that Dao Ming was no more. So, which parts of the movie actually happened, and which parts were figments of Doyle’s imagination? Let’s find out.
Spoiler Alert
Doyle Hallucinated Dao Ming
As far as I could decipher, everything that we saw from the beginning of Ballad of a Small Player to the 48-minute mark actually happened in Doyle’s life. His run-ins with Blithe, the devastating game with Grandma, his friendship with Dao Ming, and his conversation with Adrian Lippett (his “old friend” who had alerted the authorities that Reilly was alive) all really happened. He did suffer a cardiac arrest because of his mounting anxiety and since he had consumed an unimaginable amount of food and alcohol in a very short period of time. Everything after that, in my opinion, is a big, fat question mark. If you take the events of the film at face value alone, you can say that Doyle went to Dao Ming’s house after getting his hands on that postcard that had the address of her house. Maybe he was taken to the hospital after his cardiac arrest, and after that he escaped and got to Lamma Island. Or maybe he was left to rot on the streets of Macau with nothing but that postcard, and when he regained some of his strength, he went to Dao Ming’s house. There, he ate whatever was somewhat edible and recuperated. Eventually, the creaking sound of the storage room attracted his attention, and he opened the padlock on the door with the code that Dao Ming had written on his palm prior to his death. He got the cash, won his way to the top, was accused of having a ghost on his shoulder, and then disallowed from playing anywhere in Macau, but he managed to convince the managers of Wynn Palace to let him play one last hand.
Doyle won against Lippett. He used some of that money to bribe Blithe, got her to stop trying to get him arrested, and even danced with him (sit through the end credits to watch it). Then he went to The Rainbow in the hopes of reuniting with Dao Ming and giving her the money he had won with the cash he got from her house, only to learn from Grandma that she had died by suicide right after they attended the ceremony of the Hungry Ghost at the temple (at around the 23-minute mark). Reality hit him hard, and he proceeded to burn all the money he had won in the fire that was lit at the temple, thereby partaking in the week-long ritual where one burnt offerings to the dead and then probably promised to himself he’d lead a life of honesty. That interpretation would allow you to see Doyle as a guy who had redeemed himself after almost losing his soul because of his vices. While going on this journey of redemption, he managed to uplift a working-class woman like Blithe, and he got to punish somebody as duplicitous as Lippett. Win-win for all parties concerned, right? But doesn’t that feel a little too convenient? If so, allow me to present a couple of alternative theories.
Doyle Imagined His Redemption
My first theory about the ending of Ballad of a Small Player completely erases the part about him using Dao Ming’s money to return to the top. I feel that Dao Ming’s hallucination, coupled with the postcard for Lamma Island, did lead Doyle to the cash. When he saw all that money, his mind short-circuited and played a vision where he hit the casinos, won big, paid off his debts, defeated Lippett, and bribed Blithe. After that, the vision came to an end, and he thought that the money he was taking to The Rainbow was his winnings, but in reality, it was just Dao Ming’s savings stashed in a couple of briefcases. That was where he learned that Dao Ming had died a long time ago, and he had imagined the part about Dao Ming saving him after his heart attack. Maybe we did not see it, but it’s possible that as he was sobbing in Dao Ming’s apartment, he also understood that he had only imagined using Dao Ming’s money to make more money, and none of that had actually happened. Either way, at that stage, Doyle was left with 2 options: he could continue his descent into darkness with Dao Ming’s money, or he could burn it all, because he knew that it was wrong to spend Dao Ming’s hard-earned savings for his own evil pursuits. He chose the latter, shed his Lord Doyle personality, and became Reilly. Despite everything that he had done, the reason Doyle came off as one of the “good guys” was because he chose to sacrifice Dao Ming’s money, as he felt that if she couldn’t spend it, then nobody else should as well.
Without that money, Doyle was broke. However, he was alive, and that’s what mattered. He had spent a major chunk of his life the way he wanted. He had seen many gamblers plunge to their death. He had thought about doing so himself. Maybe he could use the rest of the years he had to atone for the sins he had committed, because that’s probably the only thing that could give him true freedom. Dao Ming was burdened with guilt and shame because she had supposedly stolen money from her parents and never managed to return it to them (yes, we saw Doyle hearing that story in a vision, but maybe he had heard about it prior to her death and was only replaying it at Lamma Island). She thought that death would give her freedom, but there’s a pretty good chance that her final thoughts weren’t all that positive. Since Doyle hasn’t chosen that path, at least for now, he can try doing right by all the people he has wronged. There’s no guarantee that when he’s on his deathbed, a wave of forgiveness will wash over him and cleanse him. But, at the very least, he’ll know that he tried to do the right thing, whilst warning all the people to never dabble in gambling, which is a hundred times better than doing nothing at all.
Doyle died
My second theory about the ending of Ballad of a Small Player is that Doyle went into a coma due to the heart attack, and everything that happened after that was just a vision that his catatonic mind was spinning. Here’s why. The last proper conversation that Doyle had before suffering a cardiac arrest was with Lippett. During that chat, a fable about the gambler who woke up in the afterlife came up. The story goes something like this: a gambler died by suicide and went into the afterlife, which took the form of a “sumptuous casino.” There he treated himself to chilled champagne and girls. And he won every single hand that he played. As he began to feel invincible, he turned to the player beside him and said that he was surprised that he had made it to heaven because he was sure that, after everything he had done, he should be in hell. That other player told him that the place he was in was actually hell. Now, if you analyze the second half of the film with that exchange in mind, Doyle’s convenient wins, the ghostly hallucination, and his never-ending feeling of guilt and shame about not being able to save Dao Ming make more sense. He was stuck in a purgatory, or hell (to be specific, Buddhist Hell, or Naraka) of his own making where he was convincing himself that he had done right by Dao Ming by offering her money to the Hungry Ghosts. I think that Doyle always knew that Dao Ming had died on that beach. Maybe he had seen her dead body as well. However, the shock of that sight caused him to bury that memory deep within his psyche. It only came to the surface when he was stuck in that vision where he was winning with the intention of paying back Dao Ming more than he had taken from her.
It’s possible that the numbers Dao Ming had written on Doyle’s hand wasn’t the key to a padlock at all, and she had written the date on which she had run away from her village, that is, 31st July, 2005. But if Doyle learned about Dao Ming’s backstory in a vision, how true could it be? Well, I think that Dao Ming shared her life story with Doyle at that beach itself. He had pushed it to the back of his mind, and it resurfaced when he was in that purgatorial vision. Will Doyle live or die, though? Technically, it depends on his health, which isn’t looking all that positive. So, there’s a good chance that he’ll die. What matters, though, is Doyle reckoning with everything that he has done before slipping away. I mean, no matter how you perceive Doyle, the world will be better off without people like him—people who not only keep a sadistic industry alive but also hurt the people around them while destroying themselves. Hence, before leaving this world for good, if he accepts that he was a criminal (he kept saying that he wasn’t one) and not a victim of circumstance, it’ll be a big win. Anyway, those are just my thoughts on the ending of Ballad of a Small Player. If you have any opinions on the same, feel free to share them in the comments section below.
