Mississippi Grind (2015)

Mississippi Grind arrives from 2015, a year when the culture had not yet fully committed to auditing its road movies, and it proceeds to offer almost nothing for the auditors to seize upon. Two gamblers, Gerry and Curtis, drift down the river from Dubuque to New Orleans, visiting dog tracks, riverboat casinos, and pool halls. The film is a study of compulsion and borrowed money. It observes these men with melancholy and lets them ruin themselves without interruption. This is a picture about addiction, and it treats addiction as a private affliction, which is to say it makes no argument on behalf of anything.

The cast is diverse in the quiet manner of a well-staffed ensemble. Alfre Woodard plays Sam, a loan shark who wants her money. Sienna Miller plays Simone, a prostitute. Lio Tipton plays Vanessa, another prostitute. Robin Weigert plays Dorothy, the estranged ex-wife. The film presents these roles without comment, and the film has no interest in comment. Race never surfaces as a subject. Gender never surfaces as an argument. The women function as creditors, transactions, and reminders of a life Gerry has already squandered, which is a traditional arrangement and not a thesis.

The ruin on display is financial, and the film declines to read it as a systemic indictment. Debt here is a personal failing, not a condition manufactured by late capitalism. Gerry's compulsive betting is framed as self-destruction, never as a celebrated difference in cognition. There is no climate concern, no historical revision, no sermon. Co-director Anna Boden supplies a female hand on the material, though the material remains a male buddy picture to its bones. The result is a well-acted, atmospheric film that asks nothing of its audience except attention. In the current taxonomy, that restraint reads as almost quaint. We classify it accordingly.