Mississippi Grind

Synopsis:  Chronic gambler, Gerry (Ben Mendelsohn), is down on his luck when he meets poker player, Curtis (Ryan Reynolds). To Gerry, Curtis seems to be a good luck charm and he convinces the younger man to go on a road trip through the South in search of a big score.

Stories about gamblers and hustlers lend themselves well to neat little genre films about slightly disreputable characters.  Writer-directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s film joins laudable company such as David Mamet’s House of Games and Stephen Frears’ The Grifters in telling such a story (there is an explicit acknowledgement of the tradition in the casting of James Toback, writer of The Gambler, in a small role as the host of a private poker game).

I confess to being mystified by Ben Mendelsohn’s rise in America in recent years. Whether as a gay viceroy in Ridley Scott’s rather peculiar Exodus: God & Kings or an unstable submariner in Black Sea, he seems to me to remain essentially the rough-and-ready character he has played in many Australian films from Return Home to his break-out role in Animal Kingdom. Here, however, in what is effectively the lead role, he gives a winningly nuanced performance which leaves his familiar smart-arse larrikin persona well behind.

Mendelsohn’s Gerry is a quietly desperate loser with an unshakeable conviction that his misfortunes are just bad luck and that somehow, sometime that luck will change.  When he meets Ryan Reynolds’ Curtis in a poker game in Dubuque, Iowa, he is convinced that finally that change has become a possibility. In this respect Gerry is the principal focus of the narrative   - a weak individual, a liar and petty thief,  who knows better and who clutches at Curtis as a means of climbing out of the hole he is in.  It is far less clear why the smoothly, self-possessed Curtis responds to Gerry’s overtures of partnership but as this is a movie about gamblers, illogical or superstitious behaviour is not such a problem. Either way, what initially looks like it might be a set-up turns into a story of genuine friendship.

Boden and Fleck’s script nicely develops the relationship between the two men, giving each a bit of backstory and keeping the focus on their characters with the plot more in service of revealing this than any importance in itself. Their direction is also suitably understated, keeping the film  within its detached existential frame rather than letting it blow out into a typical road trip/buddy movie.

For anyone who likes stories about life lived in the margins, Mississippi Grind should reward.

Want more about this film?

Want something different?