Mississippi Grind gives us a protagonist whom we believe completely as a man consumed by his addiction, yet also complicated enough to be defined by more than one layer of identity.
As played with extraordinary control (but also crackles of live-wire intensity) by Australian actor Ben Mendelsohn, Gerry, an unhappy 44-year-old from Iowa, isn't the sort to lay all his cards on the table right away. The opening setup, in which a handsome gent in his 30s named Curtis (Ryan Reynolds) strides into a casino, plops himself down at a poker table and talks up a genial storm as he buys Gerry a bourbon, shows the latter man doing little more than quietly reacting, wondering exactly how to respond to this friendly, charismatic stranger in his midst.
Before long the two men are bonding happily over booze and cards, racetracks and billiards, and gradually unveiling their different histories. When he's not sleepwalking his way through his job as a real estate agent, Gerry is gambling, a ruinously expensive hobby that has resulted in a pile of debts overseen by a loan shark (Alfre Woodard).
Curtis, by contrast, seems to be a man of few attachments or emotional baggage, a dynamic, free-spirited risk taker whose current hot streak seems to shake something loose in Gerry, especially when his own performance seems to improve in Curtis' company.
Convinced that Curtis is a good omen, Gerry persuades the guy to join him as he gambles his way along the Mississippi River down to a big poker game in New Orleans with a hefty $25,000 buy-in; Curtis helps him out by staking him $2,000 to start.
One of the pleasures of Mississippi Grind is the way it shows us Gerry and Curtis renegotiating the parameters of their relationship as the picture progresses; each one deceives the other at different points in an attempt to maintain the upper hand, but they always come back together, drawn not only by their shared compulsion but also by genuine mutual affection.
For all the film's pleasurably unhurried narrative rhythms, the final 20-minute stretch seems to suffer from an excess of possible endings, a flaw that nevertheless makes a certain kind of sense: Every reversal of fortune, we realize, can be outdone by another, stranding the characters in a twisty, never-ending cycle of winning and (more often) losing.
Justin Chang, Variety
Mississippi Grind (B)
Directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck. R (language). 108 mins. At the Look Cinemas Prestonwood.
