Mississippi Grind, film review: The ugly, blotchy face of gambling addiction

(15) Ryan Fleck, Anna Boden, 109 mins. Starring: Ben Mendelsohn, Ryan Reynolds, Analeigh Tipton, Sienna Miller, Robin Weigert

Game of throws: Ben Mendelsohn and Ryan Reynolds in ‘Mississippi Grind’

Hollywood has always romanticised gamblers. The characters at the card tables are invariably good-looking and charismatic. Even when they're on losing streaks or behaving in self-destructive fashion, they never seem to sweat too much.

Mississippi Grind is a rarity: an American movie about gambling that actually acknowledges that when you stay up all night in a badly lit room, your skin is likely to become very clammy and blotchy.

Gerry (Ben Mendelsohn) is an estate agent who has already all but destroyed his life, but seems determined to ruin it a little bit more. Mendelsohn is an engaging actor who always goes against the grain. If he is cast as a psychotic villain, he will play the role with quirkiness and disorienting charm (as in Slow West). Here, as the leading man, he has a hangdog vulnerability that makes you root for him one moment, and a creepiness that makes you despise him the next.

Gerry's mournful quality is contrasted with the easygoing charm of Curtis (Ryan Reynolds), a charismatic young gambler who is impossible to "read", primarily because he doesn't care about winning.

One of the film's unlikely strengths is the way it takes ideas and characters we've seen many times before and gives them a fresh spin. The storytelling style is so offbeat that you don't notice how cornball it sometimes becomes.

What Mississippi Grind does capture brilliantly is the shifting emotions of the gamblers, their bursts of elation and the stomach-churning despair that (in Gerry's case at least) follows. The film-makers show the fatalistic masochism of the gamblers.

There is a deep ambivalence at the film's heart. On the one hand, the heroes' behaviour is portrayed as pathological. Their gambling is an illness. On the other, Gerry and Curtis are on an exhilarating ride. "The journey is the destination," is Curtis's motto. Even if he knows he will never reach the end of the rainbow, he'll make sure he enjoys himself as much as possible in not getting there.