So I decided to read and remark upon all the awards scripts that are going around in Caty’s excellent post.
Mississippi Grind is an inexpensive little buddy drama with a lot of heart and a middle weight hook. Two very different gamblers meet by chance (how else would they meet?) and perpetual loser Gerry believes he has found a human good luck charm in handsome drifter Curtis. It seems only logical that the two should team up and head south to a mythical poker game in New Orleans, picking up enough for the $25k buy-in by stopping in every casino on the Mississippi, so that Gerry can finally win enough to cover the money he has lost. Nothing, as it turns out, can cover his other losses.
There are no big surprises in the action, this is a festival of great dialogue and gimlet-eyed honesty about the way people need and fail each other in equal measures.
Filled to the brim with a gambler’s sense of superstition, the script’s final challenge pivots on faith, with results that are inevitable.
The plot is straightforward and familiar, but fresh story pops out of the friendship between the two men and their multiplicity of shadows and flaws.
Project recommendation: Recommend