Los Angeles Times

Poker with high stakes

‘Molly’s Game,’ like the world around which it revolves, takes risks to win big.

- JUSTIN CHANG FILM CRITIC

In the electrifyi­ng “Molly’s Game,” Jessica Chastain almost never raises her voice. She speaks with a calm and clarity that pull you in, conveying intimacy and authority in the same breath.

It’s a shrewd tactic that underscore­s the cool, guarded temperamen­t of her real-life alter ego, Molly Bloom, a ferociousl­y smart cookie who at 26 found herself running a high-stakes poker empire — a job she landed by safeguardi­ng secrets, instilling trust and avoiding the kind of spotlight that writer-director Aaron Sorkin has now thrown upon her.

Chastain’s measured delivery may also be due to the fact that she has an ungodly amount of dialogue to plow through — did I mention it’s an Aaron Sorkin movie? — and an excess of volume would have almost certainly cost her in speed, coherence and stamina. At 140 minutes, this movie qualifies as some-

thing of an endurance test, crammed to the rafters with voice-over narration, rapidfire banter and some gratifying­ly cogent poker commentary. But as endurance tests go, “Molly’s Game” is also an incorrigib­le, unapologet­ic blast — a dazzling rise-and fall biopic that races forward, backward and sideways, propelled by long, windy gusts of grade-A Sorkinese.

Drawn from Bloom’s 2014 memoir as well as episodes and experience­s she didn’t include, the movie is a big, brash tale of American striving as well as an identity blurring, chronology-fudging bit of storytelli­ng business. It’s held in check, and held together, by its cleareyed admiration of its protagonis­t and a genuine sense of commitment to her story.

This is no small thing for Sorkin, who, in his long and productive career of writing for film and television, from the testostero­ne-heavy offices of “Sports Night” to the dizzying techno-prophet narratives of “The Social Network,” “Moneyball” and “Steve Jobs,” has never before given us a proper female lead. But he’s found a superb one in Bloom and a formidable, irresistib­le heroine in Chastain, and he’s returned the favor by allowing the character to tell her own story from start to finish.

If incessant voice-over is inherently uncinemati­c, then “Molly’s Game” might be the exception that proves the rule. It may not have the rich visual flourishes that a David Fincher or a Danny Boyle might have brought to the table, but Sorkin, in a solid directing debut, knows instinctiv­ely how to shuffle images, dialogue and music together for maximum narrative drive.

A terrific opening sequence finds Molly narrating a painful flashback to her days as a world-class skier, specifical­ly the painful accident that dashed her Olympic dreams. It’s a sharp, teasing setup for a tale of even higher stakes and steeper falls from grace, set in motion by an early scene of Molly being arrested by the FBI for her alleged involvemen­t in an illegal gambling racket.

Flash back a few years to around 2003, when Molly puts her law-school plans on hold, leaves her Colorado hometown and moves to Los Angeles. There, she begins working as a cocktail waitress and then an assistant to a Hollywood insider, Dean Keith (Jeremy Strong, nice and sleazy), who soon has Molly running his weekly poker night out of the Cobra Club (a stand-in for the notorious Viper Room), complete with $10,000 buy-ins from a pool of hand-picked, high-profile names.

The details of how she hijacks the operation and gives it a stylish upgrade — a suite at the Four Seasons, multiple games per week, millions of dollars on the table — make “Molly’s Game” the most absorbing poker movie in many a moon, told with breathtaki­ng dexterity and an invaluable assist from a crowded supporting cast. The actors who plant themselves at Molly’s table include Michael Cera (a vicious stand-in for Tobey Maguire), Brian d’Arcy James, Chris O’Dowd and Bill Camp, the last especially good as a seasoned player who bottoms out spectacula­rly in one of the movie’s many cautionary anecdotes.

Even before a few Russian mobsters get in on the action, taking this loaded but legal enterprise in a more sordid direction, Molly has no shortage of greedy, overconfid­ent men to cajole, spar with, counsel and occasional­ly turn the tables on. But for the most part, she remains on the sidelines, an alluring, unattainab­le enigma, and Chastain underplays beautifull­y, with a level of nuance that eclipses even her earlier take-no-prisoners performanc­es in films like “Miss Sloane” and “Zero Dark Thirty.” Chastain draws us so deeply into Molly’s lightning-speed thought processes that you can almost see her synapses firing, making “Molly’s Game” not just a biographic­al portrait but a genuine thriller of the mind. The thrill comes from watching Molly figure everything out: She knows little about poker or high-stakes gambling when she’s first getting started, but she has an appetite for research, an ease with technology and a knack for calculatin­g an idea’s untapped potential.

If the movie emerges as a celebratio­n of its heroine’s wits, it is also, ultimately, a defense of her scruples — something it achieves through a deft combinatio­n of “Social Network” structural gimmickry and “Steve Jobs” sentimenta­l back story. For the movie’s purposes, the two most important men in Molly’s life are her attorney, Charlie Jaffy (a superb Idris Elba), who both loathes and admires her refusal to sell out her client list for a possible reduced sentence, and her demanding, emotionall­y distant father (Kevin Costner), who materializ­es, in key f lashbacks, to teach and torment his daughter anew.

The most questionab­le scene involves the fastidious unpacking of Molly’s daddy issues, sending Sorkin’s penchant for over explanatio­n into overdrive and potentiall­y chipping away at the movie’s feminist bona fides. At the risk of mansplaini­ng myself, I’m not sure that it does. Molly isn’t reduced, simplified or sentimenta­lized by her reckonings with the past, and the victory she wrests from the closing scenes is nothing if not fully earned. She’s a winner in a movie that proves worthy of her.

 ?? STXfilms ?? JESSICA CHASTAIN portrays an organizer of high-end card games.
STXfilms JESSICA CHASTAIN portrays an organizer of high-end card games.
 ?? Michael Gibson STXfilms ?? THE HIGH-LEVEL cast of “Molly’s Game” is led by Jessica Chastain in the title role. Idris Elba costars.
Michael Gibson STXfilms THE HIGH-LEVEL cast of “Molly’s Game” is led by Jessica Chastain in the title role. Idris Elba costars.

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