Director: Aaron Sorkin
Writer: Aaron Sorkin
Cast: Jessica Chastain, Idris Elba, Kevin Costner, Michael Cera, Jeremy Strong, Chris O'Dowd
Runtime: 140 mins.
2017
Molly's Game begins with its best scene. While Molly Bloom (Jessica Chastain) spits machine gun exposition voiceover, we see her prep physically and mentally for a defining moment in her life: a shot at qualifying as an Olympic skier. Molly's patter paces the edit. She contextualizes the specifics of the circumstance, the enormity of the stakes, and the fallout of the accident that is to take place. It feels propulsive, thorough, alive.
It also feels like a bit of an apology, as if well aware that rest of the movie alternates between nondescript rooms and hallways. Molly's Game is the directorial debut for Aaron Sorkin, famous for penning political scripts with rat-a-tat dialogue. Here may be his least openly political work, a step by step recounting of Molly Bloom's rise to prominence in the high stakes underground poker scene, and then to even greater prominence as tell-all autobiographer and subject of an FBI investigation into the Russian mob. In the courtroom drama framing narrative, Molly insists upon her innocence and ignorance, though she refuses to cooperate fully when it comes to naming names.
For a first time director, Sorkin's film is competently shot. He excels most of all at capturing the rhythm of a game, dissecting a crucial moment, propelling the audience into a basic understanding of complex systems. The movie shines when it comes to rest on such moments. Sorkin's enthusiasm is like that of an academic friend who can't help but talk your ear off about their thesis. Beyond the competence, though, there isn't much of anything visually insightful, elucidating, or innovative. As such, that feeling of propulsion so successfully achieved early in the film is hamstrung by turgid family drama, a lame legal battle, and the horribly overbulked runtime. Molly's constant narration also wears us down; smart of Sorkin to highlight his dialogue, but film is a visual medium and too much chattering voiceover becomes monotonous.
The worst example of Sorkin's worst impulses is a scene towards the end of the film at an ice skating rink. Molly has wandered off while her attorney Charlie Jaffey (Idris Elba) does law stuff. She feels serious and sad until she finds an ice skating rink and rekindles her love of going fast on smooth surfaces. She goes too fast, and she falls over when her long absent psychologist father (Kevin Costner) just so happens to show up at Molly's moment of greatest emotional need. They then have a conversation in which he claims to give her "three years of therapy in three minutes."
The first irksome thing about this scene is the coincidence. Already the ice skating was too sentimental to mesh with the rest of the film's severe tone, now we have to swallow a long lost father figure poofing into existence at a moment of emotional climax? Costner encroaches on the film like a guardian angel in a Hallmark movie, or a last visit from a spouse who we later learned died in a car accident the very hour they appeared to their beloved one last time. I can accept a certain amount of contrivance if the payoff is strong enough, but Daddy Costner's speech to Molly alternates between facile and offensive. He gives her some Bad Freud 101, tells her she has Daddy Issues, gaslights her a little bit about how he raised her, then tells her he was lying about any of that stuff mattering and the only real mistake she made in her life was the freak branch-tripping accident at that ski event so long ago. Useless.
Sorkin is clearly sharp, but his writing has the emotional depth of a redditor who thinks 'woman problems' can be solved with logic. As such, none of the characters are resonant at all, though Idris Elba does some pretty fine work with a cliche of a character (despite his bizarre freewheeling accent). Molly is little more than a mechanism to keep the plot chugging. She never becomes more dimensional than an overachiever who is also a pretty nice person most of the time, and who wears a seemingly neverending parade of ostentatious dresses. As the film drags on, her lack of personal connections makes her seem kind of chilly and bland. Maybe keeping Molly at arms' length is an intentional reflection of the character, but it would take a better movie than this to activate the potential in that choice.
Molly's Game is pretty solid when it revels in the culture of the game, the empire building, and the interpersonal manipulation inherent in Molly's line of work. Ultimately, it's hard to stay invested for two hours in a story that we more or less know the shape of, told about a person who hasn't particularly endeared herself to us. But it's an easy watch, one that can be very much enjoyed as a procedural drama about a hypercompetent woman acting and reacting within a complex system.
2.5 / 5 BLOBS
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