Not just the performance of the year, but possibly the performance of the decade. Mississippi Grind (also featured in my future classics article) sees Ben Mendelsohn - that superb, dark, rough-around-the edges character actor - take on his first real lead role, and the result is great - like pantheon great. As Gerry, Mendelsohn stars as an addicted gambler on one last card binge to a prayerful fortune. He isnt a science genius or a great writer or a child-soldier or a man who crafted one of the two-or-three greatest albums of all time. Hes that other thing, that thing so prevalent in 70s film but now all but vanished from the cinema: a normal guy. A normal guy with some issues he cant quite resolve. A normal guy with normal feelings who finds another pretty normal guy (Ryan Reynolds, in a great performance in its own right) and starts a friendship with him because thats what real people do: they seek out people like themselves and then hang out and drink with them; share their loneliness and alienation and problems, because if you cant beat things, then you can at least join them, fuse them, make them tougher together. Broken bones grow back stronger. If thats not specific enough about Mendelsohns actual performance, then rest assured his work here transcends explanation about technique, or gesture, or timing, and though he has all of those things in spades in Mississippi Grind, it remains that his turn here is something more human than any major performance in recent memory. It belies description. It just is.
