A sort of bromance road-movie version of James Toback's "The Gambler," Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden's "Mississippi Grind" arrives at an awkward moment: the remake of "The Gambler," with Mark Wahlberg, just came out last month.
"Mississippi Grind," which features a wink of a cameo by Toback, isn't quite as compelling as "The Gambler," but for an addiction drama it's awfully watchable. Ben Mendelsohn stars as Gerry, an Iowa loser who is sitting at a casino poker table when the game is joined by a charismatic wanderer, Curtis (Ryan Reynolds) who breaks every rule of poker etiquette but lifts everyone's spirits with his joking and wins over Gerry by buying him a top-shelf Woodford, for which bourbon the movie serves as an extended advertisement. Curtis and Gerry both win big. What's Curtis's secret? "I don't care if I win," he says. "I just like playing."
Gerry, it turns out, is no ordinary loser; he's in deep with loan sharks and begs to come along on Curtis's next adventure, a trip to a high-stakes game in New Orleans, with a stop along the way to consort with cute hookers (Sienna Miller, Analeigh Tipton). For Gerry is convinced that Curtis is his good-luck charm, although the audience senses that things are going to turn out very badly for Gerry.
The structure of the film is familiar and its appeal will probably depend on whether you find Gerry at all bearable. To me he seemed like an average guy who deserves a chance to get back to zero, but dozens of people streamed out of the Eccles screening yesterday and I can certainly see why viewers would tire of this self-destructive character, who at one point tries to rob someone close to him. Still, Mendelsohn shows flashes of goodness, and when Gerry sits down to play at the piano you see the soul in his eyes and you hope he at least makes it out of this alive.
In the third act, what looks fairly predictable goes a bit bonkers, with all sorts of new and seemingly uncharacteristic elements being thrown into the mix. I found it mostly compelling, at times even exciting, with the alternately jokey and desperate Gerry just barely keeping alive some hope for redemption. Yet I thought Curtis, the good-luck man whose invocation of rainbows invariably leads to big wins for his new friend, was the more interesting character. He's very much the secondary figure in the script, but the easygoing and funny Reynolds shows again why he's one of our most appealing leading men.
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