Aaron Sorkin spent two decades writing other people’s movies. Molly’s Game is the first one he directed himself, and the result moves like his best scripts and occasionally thinks it is smarter than the story it is telling. Jessica Chastain plays Molly Bloom, a former Olympic-class skier who ran high-stakes poker games in Los Angeles and New York and then became a target of the FBI. The film runs 141 minutes. It is a drama and a crime story, and its tagline is “Deal with her.”
Trailer, via STXfilms.
A Skier Who Finds the Table
Molly Bloom is a world-class mogul skier, trained from a young age by an overbearing father. A career-ending injury during a qualifying event for the 2002 Winter Olympics ends that life. She postpones law school and moves to Los Angeles.
There she works as a bottle service waitress and meets Dean Keith, a real estate developer played by Jeremy Strong. He hires her as his round-the-clock office manager, then orders her to run his weekly underground poker game at The Cobra Lounge.
She learns fast. She figures out how to appeal to the rich and famous players, especially the movie star known only as Player X, played by Michael Cera. The film’s whole engine is watching a woman with no seat at the table learn to own it.
Dean Keith Fires Her, and the Empire Starts
Frustrated by Molly’s large tips, Dean fires her. She does not go quietly. She poaches his players and starts her own game, one that is lucrative and technically legal.
The distinction matters for everything that follows. The L.A. game is legal. The New York game will not be.
Sorkin stacks the table with types: movie stars, elite athletes, billionaire business magnates. Unbeknownst to Molly, the Russian mafia eventually joins too. The film’s cast fills those seats:
- Jessica Chastain as Molly Bloom
- Idris Elba as Charlie Jaffey, her lawyer
- Kevin Costner as Larry Bloom, her father
- Michael Cera as Player X
- Jeremy Strong as Dean Keith
- Bill Camp as Harlan Eustice
- Graham Greene as Judge Foxman
Harlan Eustice and the $1.2 Million Hand
The film’s best stretch belongs to Bill Camp. Harlan Eustice is a skilled but risk-averse player. He loses a hand to Brad Marion, a hedge fund manager and a notoriously bad player. Then he goes on tilt.
He makes increasingly desperate bets until he owes Molly $1.2 million he cannot pay. Player X loans him the money in exchange for half of his ongoing winnings, which reveals that Player X has been staking Harlan for years.
That is the moment Molly’s Game stops being a rise-and-fall story and becomes a story about who really holds the money. Molly runs the room. She does not run the men in it.
Player X Draws the Players Away
Player X is bitter over Molly’s disapproval and her lack of romantic interest in him. So he draws her players to another game. Her poker ring collapses.
Cera plays him as a spoiled child in a hoodie, and the performance works because it never asks for sympathy. He is not a villain with a plan. He is a man who cannot stand being told no by a woman who works for him.
Molly moves to New York City. She enlists models to recruit wealthy players and builds a new underground poker empire. With millions at stake, her dealer convinces her to take a percentage of the pot to offset potential losses. That single change makes the game an illegal gambling operation.
The Ponzi Scheme and the FBI
Brad’s hedge fund is exposed as a Ponzi scheme. He points law enforcement to Molly. She pays $500,000 in restitution to his victims rather than testify.
The stress takes its toll. She becomes addicted to drugs. She allows wealthy members of the Russian mafia to join her game.
Idris Elba’s Charlie Jaffey is the film’s conscience and its best argument. He is a lawyer who takes her case and, more importantly, takes her seriously. The scenes between Chastain and Elba are the ones that hold up after the poker chips stop moving.
What Sorkin Gets Right
Sorkin wrote and directed Molly’s Game, adapting Molly Bloom’s 2014 memoir. The film premiered on September 8, 2017, at the Toronto International Film Festival, then began a limited theatrical release in the United States on December 25, 2017, by STX Entertainment. Principal photography started in November 2016 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
The casting came together quickly by Hollywood standards. On February 18, 2016, Sorkin offered Chastain the lead, though negotiations between them had not yet begun. On May 6, 2016, Elba joined to star alongside her.
Sorkin said of the pairing that the casting of the two leads was any filmmaker’s dream come true, calling them two of the greatest actors of their generation, paired for the first time, with chemistry he expected to be electric.
Michael Cera joined as Player X on September 7, 2016. Kevin Costner joined as Molly’s father on October 17, 2016, and Brian d’Arcy James was added on October 21. On November 9, 2016, Chris O’Dowd, Jeremy Strong, Bill Camp, and Graham Greene joined as well.
Bloom herself told ET Canada’s Matte Babel that she and Chastain had spent a little time together and that Chastain did not have much time for prep or research, and that she was blown away by the performance and by how understood she felt by it.
Where the Film Slows Down
The film’s problem is that it keeps explaining itself. Sorkin cannot resist a monologue, and Molly’s Game has several that stop the movie cold so a character can tell you what the movie means.
Costner’s Larry Bloom gets the worst of it. The father-daughter reckoning in the third act is meant to land as the emotional key to everything, and it plays like a therapy session with a runtime.
Chastain is the reason it survives. Her Molly is not a victim and not a hustler. She is a woman who built something real in a room full of men who assumed she was furniture, and Chastain plays the intelligence behind every smile without ever announcing it. Critics regarded the performance as one of the best of her career, and it earned her a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress – Drama. That recognition is deserved.
Sorkin’s screenplay earned him nominations for the Academy Awards, Golden Globes, Writers Guild of America Awards, and BAFTA Awards. The script is sharp. It is also the thing standing between the movie and greatness.
The Verdict on Molly’s Game
Molly’s Game is a good film with a great performance at its center and a director who will not get out of his own way. The poker scenes are tense, the rise is convincing, and the fall is earned. What drags is the insistence on explaining the theme instead of trusting the table to show it.
Here is what actually matters. The film is not really about poker. It is about the difference between running a game and owning one, and Molly Bloom spends 141 minutes learning that she never owned anything. The men did. Player X staked Harlan for years. Brad’s fund was a fraud. Dean fired her the moment she got too expensive. Every man in her life was taking a percentage, and the moment she took one too, the law came for her.
That is the sharpest thing in the movie, and it is buried under Sorkin’s dialogue. The film tells you the poker was illegal. It shows you something better: that the legal version was never fair either.
Chastain and Elba carry it. Camp’s Harlan is the best supporting turn in the picture. Costner’s scenes are the weakest. The screenplay nominations are fair, and so is the Golden Globe nod for Chastain.
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