In Mississippi Grind, Ben Mendelsohn plays an all-purpose loser seeking redemption through an all-or-nothing poker game run by a legendary gambler who once threw a (sedated) tiger into the pot when he ran low on cash. He makes his pilgrimage in the company of the bouncy, chipper Ryan Reynolds, briefly People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive, still quite sexy and very much alive. A competent but by no means superlative gambler, and a man who has serious relationship issues – Sienna Miller isn’t enough to keep this guy satisfied – Reynolds has agreed to bankroll Mendelsohn. It is never entirely clear why.
Because there have been so many films about gamblers and pool sharks and athletes and crooks in search of the elusive pot of gold that will free them from all their debts, get them straight with their bookies, and allow them to repair their fractured family lives, it is easy to follow the basic narrative thread of Mississippi Grind.
What is not so easy to follow is the gambling itself. They play various types of poker, blackjack, craps and roulette. They gamble on basketball games and dog races, and, needless to say, play the ponies. There are extended sequences where Mendelsohn is seen gazing at his cards as a queen or an ace or a seven turns up on the table. There is lots of betting, lots of posturing, lots of wisecracking and lots of stuff about “tells”, the tics, gestures or mannerisms that enables a player to determine whether his adversary is bluffing.
I couldn’t follow any of it. I vaguely understand how blackjack works – I know from bitter experience in Atlantic City that the other players hate you if you stick with an ace and a six when you should ask the dealer to hit you with another card – but the rest of the gambling in the film was beyond me. I had no idea why Mendelsohn was raising the bet when he didn’t seem to be holding much of value in his hand, I didn’t understand why he put all his money on double-zero at the roulette table, and I have no idea why a man who has never won at anything should suddenly, miraculously develop the skill to win half a million dollars in a single night at a Big Easy casino.
I know a little about cards, a fair bit about gambling and even more about bookies, but I do not know enough about any of them to follow precisely what is going on in Mississippi Grind. So watching the film is like watching a movie about rugby where no one has explained what a try is, or a movie about tennis where no one has explained the phrase “Five sets to love”. It doesn’t make it impossible to enjoy the film. But it makes it harder.
Films about sports or gambling always make extravagant assumptions about the expertise of the audience. I often wonder what foreigners make of films such as Hoosiers, Any Given Sunday or Field of Dreams, which deal with American sports that have somewhat complicated rules. I found it hard to follow Chariots of Fire, even though competitive running should not be that hard to process. I can never follow the baccarat sequences in movies such as Casino Royale. I have no idea what is going on in Rounders, The Croupier, California Split, The Cincinnati Kid or assorted films called The Gambler. The classic Paul Newman-Robert Redford con artist film The Sting hinged upon the phrase: “Place it.” I know that it is one for the money and two for the show. But I always thought it was “three to get ready”, not “three to place”. Or “place to finish second”. The whole thing is terribly confusing. Hamstrung by such defective gambling information, I never had any idea what was going on in The Sting. Neither did my mum, already in her 80s when we watched it together.
“Can you explain what’s going on here?” she asked me.
“No,” I replied. “Next lifetime.”
There are exceptions to this rule. In a recent, little-known gangster film called Wild Card, Jason Statham plays a Las Vegas tough guy who runs afoul of the mob and tries to free himself from all financial worry by making huge bets at the blackjack table. This is one of those movies where you can actually learn how to play blackjack by watching the action. But that is largely because blackjack is an incredibly simple game. Poker is not. Bridge is not. Pinochle is not.
Neither is go. Go is a classic Japanese game of encirclement, where the player with the white stones seeks to outwit the player with the black stones and vice versa. Until I saw an extremely violent Korean film called The Divine Move, I did not know that go was also played in South Korea. Nor did I know that people gambled on it. Nor did I know that South Koreans call it baduk.
In The Divine Move, a go player who has been mistreated by gangsters organises the go match of the century, assisted by other small-time hoods and masters of go. Or baduk. If he wins the game, his worries are over. But if he defeats his adversary, who just happens to be the woman he loves, she will die. Quite a predicament. But, in fact, it was impossible to follow what was going on during the ultimate go game, because the rules of the game were not available to the casual viewer. I am sure that the film made perfect sense to hardcore Korean baduk buffs. But it made no sense to me. Luckily, as is always true in Korean gangster movies, everybody ends up dead.
The new film Pawn Sacrifice avoids this problem by focusing on the drama in the famous 1972 chess tournament, which pitted the American Bobby Fischer against the Russian Boris Spassky, and not the game itself. Although there is lots and lots of “Knight to king’s bishop three” and “Pawn to queen’s knight four” badinage in the film, you can still follow the basic story: Boris Spassky is glamorous and brilliant, Bobby Fischer is crazy and more brilliant. You don’t need to understand the Sicilian Defence to follow this entertaining film, anymore than you need to understand boxing to appreciate Raging Bull. The conflict is written on the combatants’ faces, not on the chessboard. Admittedly, this might not work if the film was about jai alai or belote. Much less competitive mahjong.
Purists will argue that a particular game of chance merely furnishes the backdrop for a motion picture, that what really matters is the drama, the tension between the players, not the rules of the game. By this logic, The Divine Game or Pawn Sacrifice or Mississippi Grind could just as well have revolved around cribbage, with the player receiving instructions about the next move via a microphone planted in the player’s ear by a more gifted player observing the game via hidden camera.
“Put the five in the box and lead with the eight,” the cribbage buff would tell the player in such a film. “Do not play a jack if he plays a queen. Do not.”
The truth of the matter is, because my wife is English and I have spent so much time in pubs in the Cotswolds, I actually know how to play cribbage. And because I have spent a lot of time in France, I know how to play belote. But despite having lived in the US for my entire life, I do not know how to play most games of poker. This is because the kind of guys who invite you over to a friendly game of poker are usually not all that friendly. Whereas canasta enthusiasts are generally first-rate hipster charmers.
This being the case, it would have been a whole lot easier for me to follow Mississippi Grind if the principals had been playing cribbage. High-stake riverboat cribbage. Maybe next time.
