Question of the Day - 10 March 2018

[Editor’s Note: Since Deke wrote the answer to the gambling-movie QoD on which today's question is based, we handed this one off to him.]

I hadn’t seen the recent (2015) Mississippi Grind, so I rented and watched it.

Gerry (Ben Mendelsohn) is a failing real-estate agent, compulsive gambler, habitual liar, and frequent thief who latches onto Curtis (Ryan Reynolds) as his lucky-charm companion after the two meet in a casino poker room. With a loanshark collector nipping at Gerry’s heels, Curtis agrees to stake him on a road trip from Dubuque down the Mississippi to New Orleans, where they can buy in at a legendary poker game Curtis knows about.

Part buddy study, part road movie, and part addiction drama, it’s a small-scale film that I found to be more of a character exploration than a true gambling movie, one of a very long line of road-trip flicks about men behaving badly. Easy Rider, California Split, Sideways, Midnight Run, and The Last Detail come to mind, though only California Split revolves around gambling; to me, in Mississippi Grind, the gambling is as much a plot device as it is the central theme.

That’s not to say the movie doesn’t have its good gambling moments. I found the scenes in two poker rooms, a horse and a dog track, and a blackjack and crap table to be surprisingly well-done. The dialogue sounds a lot like gamblers talking; for example, Gerry and Curtis bet on whether the next man to come out of a restroom will be wearing glasses and at one point at the dog track, Curtis tells Gerry that backing a greyhound named Rollin’ Roosevelt is a mistake — “Never bet on a dog named after a disabled president.” There’s even a short bit about (an unnamed) Brian Zembic, who got implants to win a wager (as told in our book The Man with the $100,000 Breasts). And I was interested to see a cameo by James Toback, who wrote and directed the 1974 version of The Gambler, a film to which Mississippi Grind owes a debt; Toback also wrote Bugsy and for a time in the ’80s was one of the biggest and sharpest sports bettors in Vegas.

The movie is steeped in the atmospheric South, with a fine blues soundtrack backing a sort of travelogue with montages of riverboat casinos and dive bars from St. Louis to Little Rock to New Orleans.

For all his faults, Gerry is a more sympathetic deadbeat than usual; he’s sensitive to his surroundings (keying in on poker opponents using skills learned from listening to a tape about tells) and his tragic self-awareness makes his gambling compulsion even more devastating to watch. Curtis is more of a mystery; he’s addicted to the road more than the risk, a slick charmer who’s so good-looking and ambiguous that he easily transcends the well-worn grifter-on-a-bender role.

Unfortunately (to me), both the plot and the character motivations become kind of random and fuzzy as the movie “grinds” along. By the third act, I was wondering what ends both Gerry and Curtis are trying to achieve by means of putting themselves through situations that get them rejected, ejected, beat up, even stabbed.

And though they win in the final scene, it seems an empty victory; too much losing and alienation precede it to evoke much elation at hitting the big payoff.

Also, from what I know about casinos and high rollers, it’s unlikely (spoiler alert) that any casino would let unknown crapshooters stake $285,000 on a single roll of the dice. Casinos generally don’t flip a six-figure coin with a player, especially one who’s betting with his winnings (i.e., the casino’s money).

Moreover, the movie seems to imply that Gerry’s big win will be the cure for his degeneracy, but after an hour and 47 minutes watching this character self-destruct, it’s hard to believe that he'll redeem himself in the last minute. That's a Hollywood ending; life-affirming as it is, it's anything but realistic. 

Mississippi Grind was critically well-received, garnering uniformly good reviews, plus earning three nominations for small awards and winning two. It was, however, a financial flop, grossing $130,000 in its five weeks of release.

The foregoing, of course, is no more than my little opinion, which admittedly is low to begin with when it comes to gambling movies. I’d like to hear what others who've seen Mississippi Grind think of it and I'm sure the submitter of this question would as well.