MR-MISSISSIPPI GRIND (2015)
Ben Mendelson, Ryan Reynolds, Sienna Miller
Directors: Anna Boyden, Ryan Fleck

One won’t cash out, the other won’t settle down.

On its surface Mississippi Grind is a movie about gambling and how it can grab hold of someone’s life and control it to the exclusion of all else – family, friends, career, food, and even basic household necessities.

It certainly deals with all of these issues and more, but it’s also a classic story – two misfit drifters, thrown into each other’s paths by fortune or coincidence, toss aside care and responsibilities to set off on the great road trip in search of their fortune.

Mendelson’s Gerry comes across as a likable, if deceitful guy that you can’t help but rooting for, despite knowing that he has a serious problem and needs help.  In real life you wouldn’t want to spend time with him – you may feel some pity for him, but ultimately he’d seem pathetic.  He spends his evenings in sad local gambling parlors, just knowing that his big break is right around the corner.  He knows the gambling lines and point spreads for obscure college basketball games, but isn’t sure how old his daughter is.  The fact that the directors turn him into a somewhat sympathetic character is a minor miracle.

Curtis, played by Ryan Reynolds, doesn’t have problems with gambling the way Gerry does.  To him, it’s abstract, it’s a form of entertainment and amusement, but not something to invest your heart and soul and hopes into.  He can ride the enthusiasm of a win streak like anyone else, but also walk away and not take it personally, win or lose.  His problems take different forms.

Two Woodfords!

While Gerry needs gambling to give his life meaning, Curtis seeks novelty, usually in the form of people.  That’s how he and Gerry fall in together – Curtis sees Gerry as someone who could bring some new excitement into his life.  This is evident when he decides to stake Gerry in the wild scheme of gambling their way down the Mississippi to New Orleans.  Curtis knows Gerry is a gambling addict who owes money to everyone around him.  He has known people like this before whose lives are now utterly ruined.  Curtis knows that joining Gerry on this venture would be enabling him, akin to buying whisky for an alcoholic.  He pauses for a moment, weighing the novelty and excitement of such a venture against the likely ruination of Gerry’s life.  After a brief deliberation, the excitement of the trip wins out.  Much like Gerry can’t resist the allure of one more bet to win big, Curtis is compelled to chase novelty against all rational judgement.

So it is that these two manic, impulse-driven men who barely know one another set off on a great road trip down America’s mightiest river, winning big in one town, just to lose everything again in the next.  Along the way they run across people they’ve harmed through their compulsive behavior. For Gerry, it’s in the form of his estranged ex-wife whose disgust for Gerry and his lack of interest in his daughter’s life is evident. For Curtis, it’s an old flame named Simone, who chastises him for waltzing back into her life after a seven-month absence expecting everything to be the same.

After a series of wild financial and emotional ups and downs that ends with both Gerry and Curtis near broke and going their separate ways, things seem bleak.  A destitute Gerry wanders through the New Orleans streets, eventually making his way to a casino.  In a desperate wager with the last of his money, Gerry wins and gains a new lifeline.  Before long, Curtis finds his way to the same casino, and the two embark on a wild gambling spree culminating in a double or nothing bet of $285,000 on a single roll of dice.  

“we can’t lose, let’s bet it all, we can’t lose.” 

Mississippi Grind

As Gerry prepares for the toss of the dice on which both of their fates depend, Curtis answers a call from Simone and confesses that he loves her.  He looks to Gerry, and the two encourage each other – “we can’t lose, let’s bet it all, we can’t lose.”  Gerry tosses the dice, the sound fades, and the scene dissolves and re-emerges with the two men sitting together over a fancy meal, having won the bet and therefore almost $600,000.

If the film ended with this scene, it might feel optimistic and even hopeful, but a final scene for each character turns the mood tragic.  Gerry awakens the following morning in the hotel’s penthouse suite, clearly unsatisfied.  He opens the safe and stares at the stacks of money he won the night before and appears to be deliberating, much like Curtis did before deciding to stake Gerry at the bar in Iowa at the beginning of the adventure.  

Machu Picchu Time

Curtis wakes up later and finds Gerry gone.  He ignores a call from Simone, to whom he had confessed his love only a few hours before, and tries not to disturb the woman asleep next to him from the prior night’s one-night-stand.  He discovers that Gerry has taken half the money and left a note saying it was “Machu Picchu time” (Curtis’s code for “time to move on”).  As he checks out of the hotel, Curtis flirts aggressively with the front desk clerk, trying to convince her to come on a new, exciting adventure.

The film closes with Gerry buying back his old car, sold days earlier to finance the last gambling hurrah, and listening to his preferred CD, a compilation of poker tells.

Despite the adventure, despite the possible opportunities to learn, and despite achieving the very thing they ostensibly wanted, both Gerry and Curtis end up right back where they started, albeit slightly wealthier.  Curtis has to keep moving, and likely will until his funds run out.  He can’t settle down with Simone, he can’t settle for the good in front of him.  The lure of the new, the novel, the possible, is too much to resist.

And then there is Gerry, sitting in his old Subaru, listening to his same gambling tips, unchanged from the first scene of the film until now.  He could cash out, walk away and pay off all his debts, and return his life to something resembling normalcy.  But the audience knows him well enough by now to know this won’t be the case.  It may take a week, or it may take months, but before long, Gerry will be sitting in a sad casino in some nondescript middle-america town, going all in on a losing hand with the last remnants of his New Orleans winnings.