Mississippi Grind percolates

By Katherine Monk

Gambling movies are heartbreakers, but Mississippi Grind burrows a little nest next to your cardiac sac, and somehow keeps pumping out empathy for the schmuck sitting center-frame.

Meet Gerry (Ben Mendelsohn), the guy in the golf shirt who just walked out of the casino a loser. You can tell by the look of veiled shame that hovers above his eyebrows, giving him a world-weary quality he tries to shrug off with a “fuck it!” attitude. He’s a walking plea for forgiveness, but he can’t say sorry.

He’s the kind of guy that gets punched in the face for good reasons. And because Gerry is constantly being punished for his many pathetic flaws, spiraling ever downward in self-inflicted debt due to a chronic gambling addiction, we can’t help but pity him.

And that’s where directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck deal us into the dramatic hand that is Mississippi Grind. They throw a few cards in our direction and dare us to make an emotional bet on a total deuce.

Gerry has already lost just about everything when we meet him, but as he sits there in the casino, looking over his hand in the opening scene, we don’t know the depth of his problems. All we know is he’s a loser until he meets Curtis (Ryan Reynolds), a complete stranger who happens to like the odd hand of cards, and a certain type of pricey scotch.

Curtis befriends Gerry at the table, and when Gerry walks away with some dough in his pocket, he’s feeling lucky.

And when a gambler feels that tickle of good fortune, they’re ready to wager their own body parts to make a bet. As a result, we watch Gerry lose limb after limb, a variation on Monty Python’s Black Knight, staggering around the battlefield insisting everything is just fine.

Gerry even says something along the lines of “it’s just a flesh wound” after he gets stabbed, and it’s that burning sense of optimism that makes him a negotiable hero, even if he is a complete and utter burnout.

He feels real, which is the central strength of the writer-director team behind Half Nelson and Sugar. They create weird, but highly believable characters. And the weirder they are, the more we seem to believe them.

Aussie actor Ben Mendelsohn has no problem playing oddball characters – even though he can do just about anything. And so can Ryan Reynolds – witness The Voices. But here, Reynolds has to play the curious straight man and lucky charm.

He sees Gerry at the table and decides to get a little closer, which leaves Gerry shocked and awed – a shy bivalve on the half shell, looking to Gerry for some divine intervention before being swallowed whole by the circling sharks.

The chemistry between Reynolds and Mendelsohn has just enough grit to keep the movie churning, even though much of it happens on the small scale, which is another function of the Boden-Fleck combination.

Together they have the ability to create broad canvases that contain great detail, but that often means there’s no immediate focal point on the page. Characters have a tendency to bleed off the edge of every scene, and without a strong performance from the actors, they could easily disappear into the background fog of humanity.

Fortunately, even though Reynolds’s character never feels fully written, it doesn’t really matter because Mendelsohn is giving him so much to play with. And that’s basically where the drama lies, because even though there’s a whole storyline about Gerry trying to win enough money to clear his debt, we’re in this game for the dynamic between Gerry and Curtis.

When the chips are down, who’s got your back? Friendship is the biggest gamble of all, and when you lose, you can lose big. Boden and Fleck don’t get Shakespearean about anything, but they bring just enough risk into every scene to keep us watching.

Reynolds and Mendelsohn do the rest in what turns out to be a relatively slow game of emotional poker, but even with bad odds, Mississippi Grind wins the hand with a pocket pair of kings.

@katherinemonk

Mississippi Grind is available now on VOD, streaming and DVD/Blu-ray.

THE EX-PRESS, December 15, 2016

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