Molly's Game
Quite watchable, if slightly long, movie about players and the players who play them.
Molly’s Game (2017). Grade: B-
It’s more Sorkin! Hey, I said I liked most of the movies he’s written. Sure, they’re talky. And sometimes preachy. But so’s Rod Serling, and I like lots of his stuff, too.
If you’re worried that this is about poker, it’s not. It’s about the types of people who play expensive poker. And how Molly Bloom, for a while, turned their competitive machismo into a lucrative little venture.
Bloom is an attractive, ambitious lady who’s played by Jessica Chastain here. (I’ll refer to the character as Chastain and Sorkin portray her; I don’t know anything about the actual person, and haven’t read the book. TIME did, and lays out what some of the book/film differences are.) I’m not sure if she was named after the James Joyce character, but her dad’s a psychologist and college professor, so I’d guess so.
She’s shown as a successful amateur skiing competitor, until that’s derailed by an injury. Having grown up in a very high-expectations family, she decides to take a year off after college before starting law school.
Bloom heads to LA, gets a job as a waitress at a fancy place, meets a swaggering business type who makes her his assistant, and she helps out at the poker games he runs. There’s a lot of rich players involved; if she dresses sexily (but not too sexily), she can make a lot from tips. Eventually, she starts running her own poker games.
What holds your interest (or held mine) is the way Bloom tries to balance everything. The players are wealthy, frequently famous men, and for them, poker is essentially about proving whose Schlong is the biggest. It’s a hyper-macho atmosphere.1 Bloom wants them to see her as desirable, but not available — and not somebody they can physically push around.
Furthermore, she’s got to balance the money and skill levels out. If someone starts losing more than they can afford to lose, it’s a problem; Bloom’s her own debt collector. If someone’s just way better than the rest of the rich amateurs, they’ve got to go. There’s a lot of egos to fluff. The script does a solid job of explaining all this, and Chastain a solid job of playing it.
Most memorable, for me, is Michael Cera as a celebrity who’s a real sneaky slime — and especially Bill Camp, as a smart, sensible player whose bad-luck losses start piling up. (He’s one of those terrific character actors who never gets any starring roles but never lacks for work.)
Adding movie star mojo is Idris Elba, as Bloom’s lawyer. (You can’t run illegal high-stakes poker games forever without needing a lawyer.) The scenes between the two of them are fun, with Elba being exasperated over and over. He wants Bloom to cooperate with investigators and name names; Bloom won’t.
Sorkin presents this as stubbornly principled; he called it “heroic” in an interview. That might be going a bit far? Both the Russian and American mafia had gotten mixed up in the whole business; Bloom might have simply been trying to avoid jail time AND avoid being whacked.
And hey, our baseball buddy Kevin Costner’s around, as the dad/professor/ski coach. He starts out as kind of a gruff dad, so you can probably guess where that plotline goes. It’s nice when he relaxes a bit.
How’s Sorkin as a director? He’s fine. He doesn’t do much more than make this an extra-length episode of high-production TV, but that’s what this story is. I think it actually hurt Moneyball for Bennett Miller to use all those elegant shots of Oakland in the sunset and such; to make a pretty basic story more epic and “cinematic.”
The movie’s maybe 20 minutes too long. Not all the poker players are as fascinating as Cera and Camp; and once they leave, you start to get tired of their replacements. As we head for what we know is the outcome (Bloom’s juggling act starts to fall apart), you kinda wish Sorkin would speed it up a little.
Still, it’s a very watchable film (even if I prefer Sorkin’s preachier side). You’re not gonna learn anything from this, but you won’t end it feeling like you’ve just been made dumber. For a movie set mostly in Hollywood, that’s saying something.
And it doesn’t have much of this. Although, maybe it could have used a little:
(Wow, in that thing, is the last person we see just absolutely terrible at acting.)
SPOILER ALERT: you can go to Wiki to find out what legally happened to the real Molly Bloom. Let’s just say I think someone from a mobile home community might have gotten a slightly harsher sentence.
The real poker games included the Olsen twins, which is a surprise! Although, as John Oliver keeps telling us, they're shapeshifters. The games also had Affleck/Damon, Alex Rodriguez, and Leonardo DiCaprio… his presence in those is not surprising.
I hope this is the last time I have to hear Sorkin positively compared to Rod Serling! I don't mind Sorkin but come on... Did I mention that I just bought the complete Night Gallery on DVD for $15?! It's an amazing price for an under-appreciated series.
The story you lay out is interesting in that it tracks so well with a book I read in the mid-1980s about being a professional poker player. It was a how-to book, very much like the stuff that Loompanics was publishing at that time. It might have actually been a Loompanics title. Anyway, one thing I remember from the book was a section about the need to drive away players that are (or become) too good, and approaches to do so. I found the book extremely disturbing because I can't look at other people like that. I'd rather be dead than see people as marks.
As a result of this (and other things), I think I'll skip this one. In some ways, it's like Recount (2008). It's a good movie but it would have been fine if I had never seen it.
I remember that Seth Meyers sketch from the time. It's great. It reminds me I was just thinking about why The Matrix sequels sucked so badly. I actually have a very simple answer I won't bother telling you. But it occurred to me that Cervantes turned Don Quixote in on itself in the second novel. But with The Matrix, you just got everything the same but bigger and way more boring. This Sorkin sketch has more originality than The Matrix sequels!