Alison Rowat reviews Mississippi Grind

With: Ryan Reynolds, Ben Mendelsohn, Sienna Miller

Runtime: 109 minutes

WRITING and directing duo Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden have one major claim to fame and several minor but endearing ones. In 2006 they gave Ryan Gosling his big break, Oscar-nominated no less, with the inspirational teacher story Half Nelson, and followed this with the sporting drama Sugar, and It’s Kind of a Funny Story, a picture that dealt sensitively with mental illness.

In short, Fleck and Boden had a reputation for making small, unusual films with big hearts and lots of fellow feeling, the kind that Hollywood says it wants to make but often fails to back. And now the pair have come up with a doozy, a near royal flush of a gambling drama that should give the careers of its leading men Gosling-like boosts.

Ben Mendelsohn and Ryan Reynolds are the names, and rolling the dice, playing the hands, betting on the horses, are just some of the games their characters like to play. Make that need to play. If toothache, as Burns said, is the hell of a’ diseases, then Gerry (Mendelsohn) and Curtis (Reynolds) might be said to have the hell of all addictions in gambling. Wins do not slake their thirsts but intensify them. There is no respite in sleep because there is no sleep. The gambler takes a licking and keeps on ticking, onward to ever greater losses. Money, families, self-respect - everything goes into the pot eventually.

Gerry meets Curtis when the latter rolls up at a card game in Iowa. Curtis is young, well-dressed, full of the chat, a free and easy kind of guy. To crumpled, exhausted Gerry, who owes money to all and sundry, and who might as well have “loser” tattooed on his forehead, Curtis looks like a winner, the ideal buddy, in fact, to accompany him on a road trip through the south. Gambling as they go, the pair aim to raise enough cash to buy them entry to a high stakes game in New Orleans.

That is it, as far as the basic building blocks of the tale go. There is nothing revolutionary here. From The Cincinnati Kid to The Gambler, the movie industry has shown itself to be very fond of a punt on tales of troubled souls in search of that one big win that will change their lives. Familiarity breeds a high chance of cliches, and even Fleck and Boden do not manage to avoid them all. Where Mississippi Grind stands out, however, is in the strength of its characters. We may feel we know this pair, and where they are heading. Yet such are the quality of the performances, and the various twists Fleck and Boden weave into the story, that Mississippi Grind is anything but a grind. Accompanied by a killer blues soundtrack, the viewer goes on an easy-osey journey with Gerry and Curtis, hoping for the best but all the while expecting the opposite.

In keeping with Boden and Fleck’s previous films, there are strong female characters too, chief among them Simone, Curtis’s on-off girlfriend, played by Sienna Miller in what is her best performance to date. This is at heart a two-hander, though, both behind and in front of camera. Ryan Reynolds, who in the past was often to be found playing lightweight roles in romcoms and action movies, has been hinting of late that there is far more to him than a nice smile, and Mississippi Grind shows that to be true. He is outstanding as Curtis, a man who never met a commitment he did not want to run away from.

But the winning hand here must go to Mendelsohn, the character acting wizard from Oz. He has had a terrific run since his breakthrough in the Australian crime drama Animal Kingdom and Mississippi Grind finds him where he deserves to be, front and centre as a lead. In a business where so many seem to be after stardom first and quality next, he has put in the hard yards in unshowy character parts, and it is paying off - big time.