Movie Review: Ben Mendelsohn and Ryan Reynolds are born to lose in “Mississippi Grind”.

Around the time of his breakout in David Michod’s brutal gangland drama “Animal Kingdom,” Aussie actor Ben Mendelsohn became known as something of Hollywood’s go-to scumbag. He skeezed memorably in pictures of fluctuating quality, oozing menace and ill intent in everything from Christopher Nolan’s lumbering “The Dark Knight Rises” to Derek Cianfrance’s “A Place Beyond the Pines,” a film in which he gave, by far, the most rich and compelling performance.

I believe this to be worthy of mention because, in “Mississippi Grind” — the new picture from writing/directing team Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck — Mendelsohn gives what could easily be called the best performance of 2015. He’s unabashedly great — that much is to be expected from the actor by this point. Yet he’s also soulful, introspective and deeply sympathetic: not qualities we usually associate with his screen persona. Sure, Mendelsohn is still playing a world-class screw-up of a human being, but there’s no traces of the malevolent psychosis that he displayed in “Animal Kingdom” or Andrew Dominik’s “Killing Them Softly,” where he played a heroin-abusing dog thief. Here, he plays a sweet, flawed shell of a man. Mendelsohn is complimented ably by Ryan Reynolds: a lively, affable performer who, in “Grind”, reveals cracks in his armor that lend his screen persona fascinating new dimensions.

So it’s a shame then that “Mississippi Grind” isn’t nearly as fleshed-out or interesting as the two performance around which it orbits. What we have here is another familiar tale of the American low road: a darkly funny but ultimately thin yarn about lowlives, schemers and two-dollar thrill-seekers. It is a long, lonesome — make that an emphasis on long — journey.

Ostensibly the story of two men for whom gambling serves as a means to an unforeseeable end, “Grind” borrows heavily from Robert Altman’s classic “California Split” — which is to say, in its first twenty minutes, it steals outright from the movie. Mendelsohn and Reynolds meet in almost exactly the same way that Elliott Gould met George Segal in that earlier film. It’s an act which is to be followed by several rounds of slurry barroom poetry. Altman again. There’s even a scene where Reynolds slurps cereal to cure his hangover, as well as a shocking moment where Mendelsohn’s luckless loser is robbed at knifepoint in a parking lot. I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining here. There’s nothing wrong with pastiche and, at the end of the day, there’s plenty to recommend about “Mississippi Grind”. The good parts are very good, and it features its raw, committed lead performances in addition to capturing the dead-end energy of life on the margins of the American road with a certain dogged clarity. But its aping of other, better movies does start to feel like a stylistic crutch after a while.

Mendelsohn plays Gerry, a man who has never, ever walked away from a bet when he should have. Gerry’s a classic American deadbeat: estranged from his seemingly normal family, owing money to several unscrupulous third parties and seemingly living for the thrill of “the action”. He’s the kind of guy who listens to audio tapes on Poker tells in his car (all the time) and never bothers to take the advice. When a chance encounter brings Gerry into the orbit of fast-talking hustler Curtis, (Reynolds) the older man thinks he’s found his lucky charm. He decides that the two will haul ass down the Mississippi River, gambling all the live-long day ‘till they reach that big, mythical rainbow in the sky (a literal rainbow is employed rather early in the story in a wholly lame and uninspired fashion). Together, they are a study in contrasts: Mendelsohn has a louche, almost reptilian quality that spikes into venal fury (one of the actor’s specialties) when he senses his good chances slipping away from him. Reynolds’ Curtis, meanwhile, is more unknowable. At first, he appears to be another one of the Canadian hunk’s fast-talking, square-jawed confidence men: the kind of guy who orders you the most expensive drink at the bar and stiffs you with the check. “I’m going to Machu Pichu,” Curtis likes to say when he’s thinking about skipping town. But, as the movie plunges towards its inevitable, dour conclusion, Curtis eventually reveals himself to be just as dysfunctional as his less put-together chum Gerry. Whereas Gerry embraces his inherently self-destructive nature, Curtis seems to have constructed a series of elaborate lies around his true persona in hopes of camouflaging the ugliness that lies beneath his pursuit of money, girls and a good time.

There is a grim determination in the gambling that these men do that I found unsettling. Perhaps this is the point. Gambling only feels fun when you’re winning, which is disproportionate to the time you spend losing. After a while, gambling turns into a dull, all-too-predictable slog. So too, it must be said, does this movie. And I’ll say it again: that might all be by design. Gerry and Curtis simply meander from town to town, from dive bar to dive bar, on riverboat gambling excursions, in depressing hotel blackjack games, all the way to the leafy suburbs of Little Rock, Arkansas. What these two men are in pursuit of is harder to define. Perhaps a way out of their respective misery: Gerry has unfinished business in Little Rock with the wife of his child (they share one electric scene together that has more straight-up hurt than anything else in the movie) while Curtis’ ever-increasing rotary of city girls and shady connections begins to reek with desperation as the movie wears on.

It all feels real enough, and Mendelsohn and Reynolds both do career- best work here. The problem is, this is a movie that lives and dies on its characters and these particular characters aren’t going anywhere. I’m not opposed to characters being trapped in a cyclical narrative: people in real life don’t always change, so why should our fictional characters have to? But while another, less literal-minded director might know how to compliment these nuanced performances with filmmaking deserving of such fine work, Boden and Fleck seem to be digging into their bag of tricks with the same disconsolate recklessness as their lead characters. And it pains me to say, although “Mississippi Grind” has moments of spellbinding purity and feeling, the filmmakers are the ones coming up short here.

Boden and Fleck made a searing, nearly unforgettable feature debut in the form of “Half Nelson,” a small independent picture about an inner-city middle school teacher battling an addiction to crack that features what is perhaps still Ryan Gosling’s best performance (you know, before he was a living, breathing internet meme). Their subsequent track record has been spotty. Their follow-up to “Half Nelson”, 2008's “Sugar”, remains unseen by me but their last outing, the groan-inducing mental health comedy “It’s Kind of a Funny Story” was, not to mince words, a disaster. “Mississippi Grind” lands pretty much in the middle: it’s never so bad as to be outright unenjoyable, but it also flirts frustratlingly with revealing, interesting material before safely backing away. The idea of two characters siphoning each other’s basest respective qualities (Gerry’s left-field bullheadedness as well as his willingness to lie and steal, Curtis’ silver tongue and continuous empty promises) to fuel what is essentially a broken dream is an interesting one. And there are moments — like Gerry serenading a working girl with a lovely Satie ballad on a piano, or the magic trick involving a kitten that smacks of David Gordon Green — that hint at the tough, complicated movie that “Mississippi Grind” could have been if it had stuck to its guns and trusted its performers to carry it. But, as was the case with their last movie, it would appear these two filmmakers have a predilection for the copout. As I feared, the movie has a deeply phony happy ending, one that muddles some of the exemplary stuff that’s come before. Compulsive gambling, in the film, is depicted as an awful, repetitive, tedious thing — an addiction as much as any drug. And yet, when Gerry and Curtis finally strike it rich in Vegas in the film’s home stretch, scoring over half a million dollars at the craps table, it’s played without any hint of acidic irony: as an earnest, underdog-victory moment. “Mississippi Grind” is far from a bad movie, but it is a confused one. “We can’t lose,” Gerry and Chris repeat to each other over and over again. Are they joking?

What I’ve written in the previous paragraphs should not diminish the truly excellent work that the two lead actors do here. Mendelsohn has been many things on screen, but he’s rarely been this heartbreaking. His Gerry is a genuinely tragic figure, whom we feel and ache and care for in each second he’s on screen — even as he threatens to throw our sympathy in the trash with some truly vile and careless actions. It’s one of the bravest feats of acting in any film I’ve seen recently, and whenever the film itself flounders, Mendelsohn soars above it. Reynolds is also scary-good, revealing the nightmarish underside of his All-American alpha male charm. In many ways, he has a more difficult role: while we get a handle on who Gerry is fairly quickly, Curtis remains enigmatic and occasionally confounding in his actions all the way to his final scene. Whatever narrative missteps are made by the filmmakers, Mendelsohn and Reynolds compensate for as much as they can.

To its credit, it must be said that “Mississippi Grind” does pay attention to character. It also captures location with geographical precision and a winning sense of texture and authentic detail. The soundtrack is, put bluntly, fucking stacked: with doo-wop, Motown, blues and country so that, by the movie’s end, you end up feeling like you’re drunk off whiskey in an old-man cowboy bar. But the film is wholly disinterested in plot, and as a result, its momentum sputters. After the first thirty minutes, “Mississippi Grind” becomes a crawl. There’s weird integrity in what the filmmakers have attempted here, that much is undeniable. And one can’t help but feel that, far too often, they’re bluffing. B-