I like Jessica Chastain. She seems to have inherited the title of dame or tough broad from Barbara Stanwyck. I have a weakness for films featuring cocky women Olympians, but I was not entirely sold on seeing Molly’s Game in theaters because I’ve never gotten into Aaron Sorkin. Stop gasping. No, I haven’t seen The West Wing. Yes, I’ve heard that it is amazing. I don’t know why I never saw it. Yes, I’ve seen and enjoyed clips of The Newsroom and will probably watch it one day since HBO usually equals excellence. Moneyball is in the queue. I’ve seen A Few Good Men, Malice, The American President (he’s really into US Presidents, huh), Charlie Wilson’s War, The Social Network and Steve Jobs so it is not that I don’t like him as a screenwriter, I’m just not so into those movies that watching 7 years worth of The West Wing sounds appealing. I know that he is the patron saint of progressive idealism, but those accolades leave me cold. He makes good entertainment, but I’ve never been transported by his banter like I was by Amy Sherman-Palladino. I think that he may be a skosh overrated.
So why did I buy a ticket to see Molly’s Game a week after it opened? When I finally realized that it was based on the same book that was excerpted in Vanity Fair’s “Inside the Viper Room: Hollywood’s Most Exclusive Poker Game,” which a friend from law school shared because of my visceral hatred of Tobey Maguire, any possibility of Tobey Maguire slander was all the motivation that I needed. There isn’t any explicit reference to him though he could be a character in the film. (If you click on the old link to the article, it is now titled “Her House of Cards.”) I do plan to read the book since the tone of the article and movie are different. The actual person seems far more vulnerable and impressed by her clients.
Molly’s Game is a frenetic biopic starring Chastain as the former Olympian turned underground poker queen who suffers from an Icarus complex. It is 2 hours and 20 minutes long, which would have been fine if not for one scene that almost sucked all of the joy out of the film in which one character becomes exposition man and explains the entire film to us. Just no….and I think that his psychological profile was wrong. It is so dreadful and appears so late in the film that it is the last thing that I remembered about the film. If you watch a crap movie, but the end is good, most people will give the movie higher marks than it deserves. Sorkin took a fun, clear, time jumping, dialogue laden movie with a slick veneer then dumped a clunky, Freudian, maudlin moment that literally stops all the momentum of the film and fails to elicit any sympathy from me as a viewer. I have no idea what purpose this scene was supposed to serve other than Sorkin thought the audience needed a moral, or he was concerned that she was not likeable. Does Tom Cruise’s character need a moral or a psychological explanation for doing illegal crap in American Made? No! Stop worrying that audiences won’t like women protagonists involved in criminal enterprises. If a female criminal were unappealing, we would not have bought the ticket in the first place.
Molly’s Game is appealing because it profiles a driven woman who can’t resist being better than everyone in whatever room she occupies, exploits assumptions about her and gets a thrill from being surrounded by, but slightly above and removed from the action. She is a competitor, a benevolent goddess amused by mortal men’s antics. We get a vicarious thrill from seeing things from her perspective and ascending the ranks on the backs of these men who want to throw their money away. Unfortunately fate just keeps smacking her down and putting her in her place, not because she is a woman, but because some of her clientele is in the mafia; her business attracts the wrong attention; and there is an almost indiscernible line that she crosses into the illegal world, which for me actually was sufficient to distinguish her from more venal criminals. The Moirai would have acted similarly when faced with hubris regardless of her gender.
The weakest part of Molly’s Game is the underlying litigation of whether or not she is a decent person in a legal battle. I despise this trope and am only able to tolerate it because the real life Molly actually had legal troubles with the federal government. This part of the movie still works because of the banter between the titular character and her reluctant attorney played by Idris Elba. The previous night, I had seen The Mountain Between Us and begun to question whether or not he is actually a good actor or just has such an amazing presence that I confuse it with good acting. I believed that he was Roland Deschain in The Dark Tower, but his performances in Molly’s Game and The Mountain Between Us are so similar that I still have doubts. He is magnetic and makes the contrived portion of this plot bearable.
I felt like there was a queer subtext, possibly unintentional, running throughout the story, which I want to distinguish from the real life Molly Bloom, whom I know nothing about. As a child, there is a conversation about her teacher, which her father claims hates men, and Molly distinguishes it from being attracted to them. This comment disproportionately enrages her father as if he is actually reacting to his suspicions that Molly is gay. Throughout the film, Molly emphasizes her complete sexual disinterest in her clientele. The only time that she makes a decision that puts her in the danger zone is when she is having a conversation with her poker dealer, who gives her advice, which Molly then takes despite knowing better. If I’m remembering correctly, that conversation takes place in a bedroom. All her games transpire in hotel rooms so that is not inherently sexual, but the fact that the only time in the course of the entire film that she is persuaded to change her mind against her better judgment felt like something more was going on. It reminded me of when I was reading Terri Jentz’s Strange Piece of Paradise: A Return to the American West to Investigate My Attempted Murder-and Solve the Riddle of Myself. I sensed the subtext, but it was not confirmed until after I read the book. I don’t know why Sorkin’s work is implicitly signaling something that may or may not be true about this person’s sexuality, but something is there.
Molly’s Game is sadly a flawed film, but a highly entertaining one about a confident mover and shaker in the underground, high stakes gambling world with a code of honor that ultimately makes her credible as someone deserving sympathy in the eyes of the filmmaker and the men in her life.