Molly’s Game

Directed By: Aaron SorkinWritten By: Aaron Sorkin (based on the memoir Molly’s Game: From Hollywood’s Elite to Wall Street’s Billionaire Boys Club, My High-Stakes Adventure in the World of Underground Poker by Molly Bloom)Starring: Jessica Chastain, Idris Elba, Kevin Costner, Michael Cera, Jeremy Strong

It’s perhaps no great surprise, or

critical insight, to remark that Aaron Sorkin directs like he writes. Aaron Sorkin is a man who lives and dies by the power of the spoken word—he champions it as the foremost tool in any dramatic arsenal, and he inhabits that ethos with a fullness of force that gives way to an apparent phobia of silences.

It’s a familiar if timeless routine by now (assuming it’s performed correctly)—acerbic wit, total breathlessness, punch, panache, and an excess of energy. Sorkin’s alacritous style works for many (Emmys for The West Wing— an Oscar for The Social Network) and is just as surely a great frustration to others. I find myself somewhere in between, seduced and exhausted by equal measure.

What’s always helped in achieving the former is a director who’s unafraid to modulate Sorkin’s verbosity; to distil from his writings that thrilling wit and intellect, whilst tempering it with splashes of breathing space and a humanity that’s more readily recognised. David Fincher did it best with The Social Network, Bennet Miller made it work with Money Ball. Molly’s Game however, Sorkin’s latest, has no such luxury, chiefly because the man behind the camera this time is Aaron Sorin, and, to use poker lingo, rather than reign himself him, he opts instead to double down on the mile-a-minute outlook.

When working on Lincoln, a similarly dialogue oriented biodrama, Steven Spielberg sought to “keep his camera quiet” in order to allow Tony Kushner’s screenplay to unspool authentically and seamlessly. Sorkin’s camera by contrast is loud, proud and constant, the first-time director cutting a ferocious rhythm to chime with his whip-crack dialogue, as though he fears we might get bored if we’re restrained to only one piece of information per second. There’s certainly a visceral element to it, the life of Molly Bloom took place in a whirlwind, and so too does the film demonstrating it, but in the end I found the outcomes varied: occasionally spellbinding, often exasperating, increasingly overwrought.

Sorkin makes his directorial debut working from his own electric script, which in turn is based upon the fittingly superfluously titled memoir of Molly Bloom— Molly’s Game: From Hollywood’s Elite to Wall Street’s Billionaire Boys Club, My High-Stakes Adventure in the World of Underground Poker— the strong-willed, motor-mouth poker Princess of New York, who rose from the post of an astute secretary, to runner of the richest card game in America.

Sorkin’s first order of business is to split the narrative into two distinct temporalities, and then layer those disparate timelines over one another. One timeline details Molly’s unexpected rise to meteoric heights in the world of poker; the other catches up with her right as she’s plummeting from said heights.

The former begins with Molly, then an elite skier, attempting to qualify for the 2002 Winter Olympics, her perfectionist, psychologist father onlooking with quiet judgment (played by Kevin Costner). Her run looks promising for a moment, until a frozen twig dislodges her ski and with it any hopes of one day wearing Olympic gold, sending her cascading down the snowy hillside— a fall from which she is lucky to survive, much less get up from and then shortly thereafter orchestrate a weekly multimillion dollar poker game before finding herself A number 1 on the FBI’s arrest list. But as we’ll learn for the next 140 minutes, that’s Molly Bloom—impossible to keep down.

After her crash she takes up a job as an office manager for Dean Pierce (Jeremy Strong), an incompetent property developer with a habit of flexing power he doesn’t have. Dean’s a jerk, but he does initiate Molly into the world of Texas hold ’em via his coveted underground game, one which attracts all manner of big name stars—wealthy bankers, top-tier sport talents, Hollywood A listers (allegedly among them Leonardo Di Caprio, Ben Affleck and Tobey Maguire—the last of whom is represented by Michael Cera with sly sliminess.)

At first, Molly, who is tasked with operating the game, is out of her depth, but she’s a quick learner. Before long she’ll be educating us on the game’s cryptic vernacular via cutaways reminiscent of Adam McKay’s similarly hyper-energised The Big Short, before she quits Dean’s employment after one insult too many, and branches off to her run her own game, feeding off the tips from her star-studded clientele and forging a healthy living in the process. That is until her game attracts the less savoury likes of the Russian mob, and with it the ire of the FBI.

That’s where the second timeline kicks off, with Molly’s head pressed against her apartment wall and a torch shone brightly in her face as an army of FBI agents detain both her and every dollar she ever made.

Charlie Jaffey (Idris Elba) is the straight-as-an-arrow lawyer who hesitantly tasks himself with Molly’s legal counsel, dialoguing and diatribing endlessly to earn Molly, who pleads ignorance as to the nefariousness of her players, her freedom.

Elba proves mightily adept at delivering said dialogues and diatribes, anchoring them in a fierce but gentlemanly decency. Never to be outdone however is Jessica Chastain as Molly, buoying the film with her carefully calibrated brand of frosty fieriness, and looming as the largest presence in every room in which she appears— not through showiness, but through an intuitive intelligence and a seldom wavering cool. It’s Chastain, tasked with narrating what feels like every gesture of every person in every frame, who breathes life into the film’s thematic currency— a strong woman who never for a second bends to the desires of the insatiable men around her—and its Chastain who best works Sorkin’s dialogue, thrilling us whilst instilling quiet charisma in a character who otherwise might have been rather bland.

Not even the note-perfect delivery of Sorkin’s lines can disguise their artifice however (for a true story Sorkin’s characters can’t help but feel rather alien in their hyper-articulacy) nor the fact that Molly’s Game is a story merely told, rather than shown. One assumes that Mr Sorkin’s idea of show and tell is tell, then tell again, but faster and with more words. It’s a confession he more or less announces in the form of a late scene in Molly’s Game set upon a bench in Central Park, in which Molly’s father resolves to do what everyone wishes their therapist would do, and just tell us what’s up; “I’m going to give you three years of therapy in three minutes” Costner’s Larry Bloom decrees, like a guardian angel beamed to Earth to streamline the film’s characterisations, lest the narrative outstay its welcome.

Perhaps it’s a good thing that Molly is surrounded by men who make it their pastime to episodically sing her virtues—I didn’t find her goodness particularly implicit in the action. But I also believe the film’s emotional punches might have had more weight behind them had Molly’s nobility been a realisation I made for myself.

As if for Sorkin to pre-empt his tell-all approach, there’s an earlier scene in which Molly rants on how unjust her treatment has been at the hands of the FBI, who have made it their mission to cripple her in exchange for assistance she can’t give. “It had to be said” Molly says when she’s done. “Not really” Charlie replies. It’s like Sorkin is asking us if he can have his cake and eat it too, flexing his aforementioned intellect and wit, only to apologise for it in the next breath. On this occasion, it’s a barborous intellect and wit that I’m left more to admire than like.

Rating:

2.25/4