Welcome to The Weekend Watch, a weekly column focusing on a movie—new, old or somewhere in between, but out either in theaters or on a streaming service near you—worth catching on a cozy Friday night or a lazy Sunday morning. Comments welcome!
“Brand” is the new “movie star.” Aspiring A-listers aren’t working to establish a persona that colors and interacts with the roles they play on the big screen. Rather, those like The Rock or Jack Black or anyone tumbling out of the Marvel machine are finding ways to be blandly palatable cheerleaders for the massive moneyed interests who fully dominate the entertainment industry. They don’t have fans or employers or directors, only investors employing them as good stewards of their IP and faces of their companies. And you don’t want to alienate your investors.
Watching Ryan Reynolds succumb to this pull—what with his endless Deadpool snark and literal handful of business ventures, including a sports team, a cell company and a liquor brand—feels inevitable at this point. And there was evidence that this was where his smirking chiseled face would end up all along, sprinkled throughout the sex comedies and romantic comedies and half-baked stoner comedies of his early career. He always seemed like he could be the spokesperson for something, right? But also in that career are a few gems that offer a glimpse at Ryan Reynolds’ abilities being used against him, or against others, by filmmakers who saw his potential.
These are movies like The Voices, which gives him a wacky talking-animal movie for his Patrick Bateman turn, or Adventureland, which allows his college-cool charm to sour as it dead-ends. But maybe his best movie is Mississippi Grind, a gambling two-hander with Ben Mendelsohn directed by Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden (the Half Nelson duo who would themselves sign their souls to franchise filmmaking with Captain Marvel). I’m a sucker for a shaggy tale of degenerates screwing up their own lives, and there’s plenty of ‘70s satisfaction to be found in Mississippi Grind’s road trip, along with scruffy performances from two folks who would’ve killed Robert Altman’s overlapping patter. As Deadpool & Wolverine shows what happens when filmmaking becomes more like brand synergy, it’s nice to look back to refreshingly agenda-free hang-out movies like Mississippi Grind.
As our Sundance review from 2015 noted, Mississippi Grind might seem like a mere California Split riff, with Reynolds “positioned as the supremely cool Elliott Gould character, while [Mendelsohn] is more like George Segal’s floundering addict.” But Fleck and Boden are going a little broader and a little looser (and a little sadder) with their film. These characters don’t quite fit into the middle-class casinos and card games of Altman’s movie; they instead feed off the bottom as much as they can, like those training sequences in The Color of Money where Tom Cruise is cleaning up in dive bars. Their addiction has progressed beyond polite society, bonding them together as they navigate the lowest rung of the social ladder.
Bumming around the back rooms and bars and dog tracks of Little Rock and Tunica and Dubuque, Gerry (Mendelsohn) and Curtis (Reynolds) always seem to be one observed crime away from the slammer. One wrong pissed-off card-slinger away from being found dead in an alley. One too many nights where the money got pissed away on sex workers and booze rather than food and shelter. With Mendelsohn, it’s heartbreaking. He’s already got such a beaten-up face, that harmless lisp, those eyes that look like they’ve tried and failed everything. His path is clear, his problem clearer. But Reynolds is the mystery at the film’s heart. This guy’s slimy, but confident. Why’s he hanging around a guy so clearly flaming out?
As this side of Curtis reveals itself, and Reynolds takes his licks, you start to understand why this role is such a good fit. It’s both his performance—snide and self-destructive and so stupid handsome—and our perception of it. Like so many of entertainment’s beautiful people, especially those who can toss off a joke like they’re thinking of it in the moment, Reynolds’ vibe for us the viewing public has always been aspirational rather than relatable. And when you mature, that aspiration can curdle into resentment. No matter how many TikTok trends we follow, our jaws will never be that cut.
So, then, watching these beautiful people for whom everything comes easy fuck up becomes deliciously satisfying. Think of all the times we’ve watched George Clooney get socked in the mouth, or fail to convince a lovely woman that he’s worth the time of day. These made Clooney more lovable and more fun to watch, not less. Mississippi Grind gives Reynolds that honor; the honor of being the self-loathing fall guy for our own deflated self-esteems. Separate even from his foil of Gerry, who could represent his potential future or could just be a guy he likes to hang around to make himself feel something—anything—Curtis offered Reynolds something even better than playing against type: playing with type. It’s painful to watch a sadsack flail into oblivion; it’s unpleasantly cathartic to watch the same happen to a smooth-talking hunk. Now that Reynolds is firmly lodged in the MCU, that kind of performance might not happen again for a long while. But, hey, even Wolverine got a thoughtful “old man” movie. Maybe Reynolds will too.
Jacob Oller is Movies Editor at Paste Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @jacoboller.
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