GOOD GOLLY, MISS MOLLY’S ON A ROLL
Molly BlooM was an American skiing whizzkid tipped for olympic stardom, whose career was going downhill in the best possible way after she over - came major spinal surgery, only for a terrible crash to force her to hang up her boots for good.
yet that eventful part of her life, apart from a handful of later flashbacks, takes up only the first few minutes of Molly’s Game.
The rest of the movie, which is based on a true story and marks the directing debut of illustrious screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, follows the transformation of Molly (Jessica Chastain) into a high- stakes poker ‘princess’ and her legal travails after the FBI threw the book at her for profiting illegally from gambling.
She didn’t have a seat at the poker table herself. Her job was to organise clandestine games for a wealth — and that really is the right collective noun — of Hollywood hotshots.
According to the real-life Molly’s memoir, they included the movie stars Ben Affleck , Matt Damon, leonardo DiCaprio and T obey Maguire. T ennis legend P ete Sampras was another.
In the film, a cloak is thrown over their identities. But the wiliest and most ruthless operator at the table, referred to only as Player X and played with just the right balance of cunning, charisma and slime by Michael Cera, is said to be based on Maguire.
Player X believes that ‘money won is twice as good as money earned’. He also admits that ‘I don’t like playing poker , I like damaging lives’.
THe real Molly has suggested that Maguire wanted his friend DiCaprio there to lure other bigwigs with suitably huge bank accounts, who thought they were better at poker than they actually were.
It’s a heck of a tale and Sorkin has hired some top -notch people to tell it.
Chastain gives the same kind of fiery performance — as if her principle directorial note was to personify a feisty redhead — that she delivered as a powerful Washington lobbyist earlier this year in the political thriller Miss Sloane.
Idris elba is excellent as her noble defence lawyer, Charlie. And Kevin Costner pops up from time to time as her pushy father ,a psychology professor who taught her early in her competitive life that only losers give up when the going gets tough.
Sorkin’s screenplay makes it clear that Molly needs an outlet for the ferocious will to win which had propelled her skiing career . yet 12 years after her accident she has given up on law school and is waitressing in an lA cocktail lounge, gently hustling customers into buying more expensive drinks.
Clearly, she has more to offer , and gets an opportunity when one of her customers hires her as his personal assistant.
He wants her to organise his poker sessions by finding an appropriately plush venue, inviting players who won ’t baulk at the $50,000 buy-in securing them a place, and then keeping track of who owes what.
When at the end of one evening she takes home $3,000 in tips, she realises there is money to be made. Soon, she is immersed in the world of high-roller poker , and, fero - ciously bright, quickly learns all the nuances of the game.
yet she doesn ’ t parlay this knowledge into playing and winning (though we are led to believe she probably could).
Instead, she stitches up her former employer and strikes out on her own as a hostess, a kind of high-class madam except dealing in gambling rather than sex.
Indeed, it ’s not clear whether she has any sex life at all, even though her punters regularly fall in love with her, including one particularly hapless cove played by Chris o’Dowd. When Molly’s operation hits some bumps in lA, she moves to New y ork and does the same thing there. And it ’s all legal until she starts taking a percentage.
That’s why the FBI pounces, although her spectacular financial success first yields other problems, mainly in the forbidding shape of some Brooklyn-based Russian mobsters.
Sorkin has chosen two familiar cinematic devices — the firstperson voiceover and the flash - back — to tell Molly’s story.
That works well enough, but like a poker player not quite able to quit while he’s ahead, he over - reaches. He too obviously parades Molly, for all her resourcefulness, as a symbol of vulnerable womanhood at the mercy of a string of controlling men, starting with her father and leading all the way to the Russian mafia.
A bigger flaw, but one that Sorkin is probably no more likely to address in future than he is to fly , is the rapid-fire dialogue that has become his trademark.
I loved The West Wing, the longrunning TV drama he created, but in the end too many characters became parodies, never so much as pausing for thought or breath before trading exquisite verbal masterpieces of wit and repartee.
SoRKIN’Sfilmwriting credits include The Social Network, Moneyball and Steve Jobs. He knows how to lift a story from the real world and make it work on the silver screen.
But when you stop hearing human-beings in conversation and start hearing the clatter of the screenwriter’s keyboard, a movie can begin to lose its integrity.
That’s the problem here, especially in the exchanges between Molly and Charlie. But it is mitigated by some terrific acting and what is still, fundamentally, a compelling tale of chicanery, greed and power.