My lowest point came when I was in Vegas betting on my favorite team, the Dallas Cowboys, a well-known no-no in gambling at the time, and they not only lost the game but didn’t cover in the most improbable of ways. So there I was already drunk in the early morning, laying in the middle of the giant floor of the sports betting area as people literally stepped over me while laughing on their way to collect their winnings. And it was in this moment that I realized that I should probably just go back to my days of playing drinking games with my roommate while blasting random RnB artists like Barry White from our stereo. What can I say, we were pretty weird back then.
Well seeing Aaron Sorkin’s directorial debut in Molly’s Game brought back all of those terrible memories for me. This film is the real life story of Molly Bloom, a single woman who wound up running two of the nation’s biggest and most exclusive high stakes poker games in history. She found her way into this shady underworld after failing, in of the most painful ways, to qualify for the Olympics. And after experiencing what she considered to be the lowest point in her life, she decided to take some time off before going to law school. And while she worked as the personal assistant for one of the biggest douchebags in L.A. she found herself running one his underground poker games which included some of the biggest names in Hollywood. It wasn’t long before she learned the ropes of the poker world and decided to break out on her own with of the game’s best players, Player X.
At first, things were going well until one day Molly found out that Player X was up to some shady antics. And after confronting him about it, his ego took over and he ultimately took the game away from her. But Molly was determined to keep her new lifestyle, so she decided to take her skills and her game to New York where she’s dealing with businessmen and Russians who turn out to be linked to the mafia. And this is where things started to take a turn for the worse.
Idris Elba plays Molly’s lawyer who is working the court system to the best of his ability to help get her off with as light of a sentence as possible. He reluctantly takes the case but eventually does so after realizing that she wasn’t as awful of a person as the tabloids were painting her out to be. Or at least that’s what writer/director Sorkin wants us to believe. If you’ve ever seen a Sorkin film (A Few Good Men, The Social Network) then you know going in to expect a lot of preachy and snappy dialogue; and Molly’s Game turns out to be no different. He doesn’t quite paint Molly as a slightly misguided saint but he comes pretty damn close. And to her credit, Jessica Chastain does an amazing job of showing you the real woman who was behind some of these questionable decisions. Was she an enabler of one of life’s most addicting habits? Yes but at least she never sold out her clients for money.
The acting and the intrigue of seeing some of Hollywood’s elite turn into complete jerks (Player X is actually Tobey Maguire in real life) is what makes this movie stand out. Elba and Chastain have great chemistry and Michael Cera actually nails the character of Player X. He’s the scariest kind of evil because to him, treating people badly is the same as eating a bowl of cereal in the morning; it’s really just a part of his mundane daily routine. And again, it’s Sorkin, so you know the writing is on point, even if it does sound like you’re attending one of those traveling revivals in a tent in the middle of the country somewhere.
In the end, I thoroughly enjoyed this film and I give it a rating of pretty FRESH!
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