At the movies
“Molly’s Game,” “All the Money in the World.”
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 because she has an ungodly amount of dialogue to plow through and an excess of volume would have almost certainly cost her in speed, coherence and stamina. At 140 minutes, this movie qualifies as something of an endurance test, crammed to the rafters with voice-over narration, rapid-fire banter and some gratifyingly cogent poker commentary. But as endurance tests go, “Molly’s Game” is also an incorrigible, unapologetic blast.
Drawn from Bloom’s 2014 memoir, the movie is a big, brash tale of American striving as well as an identity-blurring, chronology fudging bit of storytelling business.
If incessant voice-over is inherently uncinematic, then “Molly’s Game” might be the exception that proves the rule.
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 about 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).
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.
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 flashbacks, 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. 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.