Curtis is a mystery and sort of remains one right to the very end of this intriguing road-movie about two inveterate gamblers. When we first meet this rather handsome and charismatic 30-something-year-old he turns up in a dingy casino in Dubuque, Iowa and very noisily crashes into a poker game in full swing. At the other end of the table he spots Gerry a rather haggard looking man in his mid-forties trying to bluff his hand as cool as he can, and Curtis makes a big fuss about sending him a drink of fancy bourbon.The two men soon bond and apart from the fact that they both love gambling and booze and have pasts that they are not in a hurry to share, they have very little in common but nevertheless they become almost inseparable very quickly. When Gerry is not gambling he is a very reluctant Real Estate Broker but he has no luck with that either as we soon see him meeting up with a Loan Shark who is trying to get him to pay back the massive debts he has built up.
Curtis on the other hand is a real drifter whose entire possessions fit into one small holdall and he lives of his charm and his good looks. We are never sure why he had drifted into Iowa in the first place, but he is already keen to keep moving on, so when Gerry suggests that the two of them gamble their way along the Mississippi River and eventually go to New Orleans where there is big poker game with a hefty $25,000 buy-in, he jumps at the chance. Gerry feels that Curtis is a actually a lucky omen as since the two met, he has actually been winning for a change.
First stop for them is St Louis where it appears that Curtis has a sort-of girlfriend who gives the men a change of clothes and puts them up. It is she who reveals that Curtis has befriended a stranger before and part bank-rolled their gambling habit and who repaid him by robbing him blind, thus planting a doubt into whether this relationship which started on nothing more than a pure whim with Gerry, will also end up badly too.
What we do know about Gerry is that when he is gambling he simply never ever knows when to stop, and so when they arrive in Memphis and he plays poker without Curtis he loses all the money, and more, that they have accumulated so far. A fact he doesn’t share with Curtis, but instead he asks that they do a detour to Little Rock to see an ex-wife he suddenly reveals he has. He claims it is to try and win her back, but in reality it is to try and steal her savings he knows she keeps in the house to replace the money he has lost. At this point it seems like he really is at rock bottom.All throughout the journey both Curtis and Gerry deceive each other at different points to get the upper hand and constantly changing the balance of their relationship, but even through the roughest patches there is this remarkable genuine affection that keeps them together. Like the poker players that they are, neither men are ever easy to read. Gerry who pointlessly listens to tapes in his car on how to stop gambling only shows real emotion when he gets wildly excited about going ‘all in’, and Curtis uses his affability and his eagerness to please to cover up what is his own melancholy.
One of the real joys of this engaging and compelling movie is that the story is completely unpredictable, and filmmakers Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck have cleverly ensured that keeping us in suspense as to the ultimate outcome, we will be engaged right up until the last frame. They were helped by their faultless casting choices with both Ryan Reynolds as Curtis and the Australian actor Ben Mendelsohn as Gerry who were pitch perfect. Reynold’s Curtis just simply oozes charm and confidence but he is at his best when he shows his vulnerability, whilst Mendelsohn ensures that even when Gerry sinks as low as he can, we still empathize and never stop rooting for him.
Three standout supporting roles that really need mentioning too. Alfe Woodward as the Loan Shark was on the screen for too brief a moment; great performance from Sienna Miller as Curtis’s girlfriend; and a scene-stealing turn from Robin Weigart for her brief role as Gerry’s ex wife.
This low-budget rather absorbing indie movie that started its journey at Sundance was a excellent gamble that paid off perfectly and it deserves to win itself the audience it so deserves.
