Addicted gamblers have it rough in the movies. Given the addiction’s endgame—the house always wins, eventually—cinematic card sharks rarely end up sitting atop a jackpot and retiring into the sunset when the credits roll. Their minds, warped by the dopamine rush of coins in a slot or chips on a table, ensure that all fortune is transient.
However, “Mississippi Grind,” the latest gambling drama to explore the addict’s damaging mindset, treats its pair of marginal outcasts with a fair amount of pity and ambiguity about their future, right up to the final image. It’s far from a traditional cautionary tale like “Owning Mahoney,” where a gambler’s downward trajectory is as predictable as an oil-price plunge before an election day.
In what feels like a subconscious remake of Robert Altman’s “California Split,” the similarly titled “Mississippi Grind” follows self-defeating divorced father and occasional Realtor Gerry (Ben Mendelsohn). He’s in debt to countless bookies, but he can’t help but spend his every penny at the next table, the next horse, the next dog, the next pickup billiards game. He meets a younger man, the more carefree and seemingly worldly Curtis (Ryan Reynolds), at a poker game, and the two hit it off: Curtis has money and Gerry has a car, so they drop everything, abandoning the futureless nightlife of Dubuque, Iowa for a road trip to New Orleans, stopping at enough tables along the way to, hopefully, earn enough to enter a high-stakes gamer’s mecca in Louisiana.
Grungily photographed on 35mm, “Mississippi Grind” is a ‘70s-style character piece, evoking a time in American movie history when directors were allowed to be auteurs and wander off the reservation. Devotees of that tradition, co-directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (they made the great “Half Nelson” together) are humanist filmmakers with a deep well of compassion for their characters, crafting a number of minor-key triumphs from this enabling duo’s journey to oblivion—whether it’s Gerry watching a lonely prostitute complete a clumsy magic trick, or Curtis’ surprise visit to his mother, who still makes a living (sort of) from singing in a seedy bar. The directors draw arguably the best performance yet from Reynolds, playing against his likable screwball type to portray a grinning drifter who is either a cunning liar or a delusional head case. Mendelsohn’s work is a low-key masterpiece, never better than the well of sadness that invades his otherwise vacant visage when he first discusses the daughter he abandoned.
You may find yourself morally tsk-tsking these men’s unhealthy financial decisions, but without slipping into dreaded sentiment, they manage to earn your mercy, and perhaps even your affection.
“Mississippi Grind” opens today at Cinema Paradiso, 503 S.E. Sixth St., Fort Lauderdale.
Then there’s the affliction du jour of the 21st century indie film, sex addiction—a term whose origins date back only to the 1970s and which is still officially unrecognized in the psychologist’s bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Partly because it’s an addiction that photographs oh so well, filmmakers have milked it (sorry) for plenty of tragic and comic potential in recent years, from the sobering “Shame” to the avant-garde “Nymphomaniac” to the winningly unconventional “Don Jon” to the milquetoast “Thanks for Sharing.”
In other words, this subject has been pretty well covered by inquiring minds as of late, and the odious “Sleeping With Other People” feels not only late to the party—it also shows up empty-headed and, given the subject matter, overdressed.
The addicts in question are Jason Sudeikis’ Jake and Alison Brie’s Lainey. Thirteen years earlier—according to the film’s unconvincing prologue—they hooked up in college, when both were virgins. In present day, they meet again, outside a Sex Addicts Anonymous meeting in New York City.
He’s now a successful tech entrepreneur on the verge of selling his startup, and she’s a kindergarten teacher with stunted medical school aspirations, but their uncontrollable libidos are the only topic of interest for writer-director Leslye Headland. Jason is a charming but serial love-‘em-and-leave-‘em womanizer, and she’s an equally commitment-phobic pleasure-seeker who has been carrying on an affair with her married gynecologist (Adam Scott). Their love lives are in mutual shambles, so rather than screw up their chemistry by screwing each other, they make a pact to remain best friends, devising a “safe word” for whenever the familiar lust reawakens. Want to guess that they’ll fall in real love?
Sudeikis and Brie’s connection is believable, but it’s not enough to save the movie from itself. They, and all the characters around them, live in such a hypersexualized bubble that it’s a miracle anybody gets anything done that doesn’t involve tequila and lube. The dialogue is witlessly juvenile, and when it’s not gross, it’s tackily sentimental. Headland’s directing is chockablock with dubious choices, not the least of which is an embarrassing, slow-motion children’s-party burlesque set to David Bowie’s “Modern Love” that should prompt the Thin White Duke to return the licensing fees.
But what about the intercourse itself, the unspoken raison d’etre for the trend of morally scolding sex comedies? It’s presented as steamless, clothed, and slapsticky—always ending with a overhead shot of bedsheet-covered bodies thumping on their backs in unison—as if sketched from the limited imagination of a 13-year-old boy. In other words, it’s of a piece with the rest of this commercial product, an attempted reinvention of the romantic comedy that instead falls in line with another genre altogether: fantasy.
“Sleeping With Other People” opens today at Regal Shadowood in Boca Raton, Regal Royal Palm Beach, Silverspot Cinema in Coconut Creek, Regal Cypress Creek in Fort Lauderdale, Regal Sawgrass in Sunrise, Cinemark Paradise in Davie, Regal Oakwood in Hollywood, O Cinema in Miami (Wynwood location), and AMC Sunset Place in South Miami.
