Molly's Game

Plot: Molly (Jessica Chastain) learns to run high stakes poker games, and then starts to host them herself. It is a glamorous but tough business, so she is run out of LA and lands in New York, where she starts a higher stakes game. She attracts attention from mobsters, and soon enough the FBI raids everyone including Molly. Molly hires lawyer Charlie Jaffey (Idris Elba), and the court case leads to the final scenes.  [imdb]    [photos]

Review: Molly's Game is a well-told story. It starts with her athleticism, through her accident, and then into her subsistence wage jobs. Soon she is scraping by with a side-hustle counting chips at a poker game, and before you can say "All-IN" she is running the games herself. We sympathize with Molly because writer-director Sorkin tells the story from Molly's point of view. It is glamorous life, and it looks fun & sexy on the screen. Even after she is caught, Chastain's Molly is principled. At the end the story turns back to Molly's childhood and her relationship with her father. Sorkin's dialog is perfect as her psychologist father explains her childhood in a new way.

Molly's Game has a theme that Molly and her family are high achievers because of their pushy father. Molly is  as-successful-as-she-is because she is smart and principled -- just like her brother the athlete or her brother the doctor. Her principled nature is hard to understand, because of the drugs and her associates. I wonder if it is the puffery of autobiography, or the puffery of Hollywood, or perhaps something unique to her upbringing: My bet is Sorkin's Hollywood script. See Even More below.

Sorkin's dialog is the real star--not everyone likes Sorkin, but I do. The exchanges between Chastain and Elba in the office are well-tuned and dramatic. The final scene with Kevin Costner and Chastain looks simple, but they pack a lot of psychology into the few minutes, and I liked how they flash pack to the girlhood film, where then the words mean something completely different, "I have no heroes," she said.

Cast: Jessica Chastain, Idris Elba, Kevin Costner, Michael Cera

Written and directed by: Aaron Sorkin; Based on the book by Molly Bloom

The Music: Acoustic music by Daniel Pemberton

The Visuals: Some flashy scenes to make the card games look glamorous. Otherwise, it is mostly people talking in rooms. 

Rating: 3.5 stars: Fun to watch, great dialog. Why not 4 stars? Not sure the drama is that dramatic. 

More: The real Molly Bloom.

Even More: Based on Molly Bloom's Wikipedia page, the final scene may have been overly dramatic. It seems many charges were dropped in a plea bargain -- explicitly different from the movie. Interestingly, the Judge said she was ordered to run this game by her former boss in LA, making her an employee rather than a mastermind. The LA boss faded from the movie plot much earlier.



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