Go inside the underground world of high-stakes poker games in Molly’s Game, Aaron Sorkin’s debut as a director. Oscar-worthy performances by Jessica Chastain and Idris Elba makes this one of the top films of the year. Opening Christmas Day in most cities.
Molly’s Game (Jessica Chastain, Idris Elba, Kevin Costner, Michael Cera) – Another poker movie! Molly’s Game is the best poker film since Rounders (with Ed Norton and Matt Damon) though the standard was set in 1965 by The Cincinnati Kid (starring Steve McQueen).
Jessica Chastain plays Molly Bloom, the smart, gorgeous hostess of the highest stakes poker games from Hollywood to New York. After serving as the assistant to a slimy real estate agent who ran a high-stakes game for some rich guys, she eventually takes over the game, supplants the derelict, and becomes the go-to contact to an underground world.
As the movie opens, Molly narrates her life story, which begins as she is competing as a teenager in the Olympics trials as a mogul skier. Ultimately, this narration leads to her arrest for running an illegal card game. The story is then told in flashbacks as we meet the gamblers, the enforcers, the other women she employs to run the game and, most notably, the lawyer she hires to defend her. Much of the movie is filmed in the law office of Charlie Jaffey (Idris Elba) as Molly tries to convince the skeptical attorney to take the case and fight for her good name. Molly swears the games are legal, that she never took a “rake” (the skim off the top), and that she won’t name names. But, of course, it is more complicated than that.
She had already published a book, titled Molly’s Game, that names four people as players. But, she points out that those four people had already been named in an indictment that had come from prosecutors based on the testimony of one of Molly’s former poker players. She hadn’t named anyone else, swearing that she didn’t want to ruin their lives or their families. This is a woman with integrity, grit and guts who is in big trouble and looking for help. The government has seized all of her money and is squeezing her hard to implicate players who are part of the Russian mafia.
Molly’s Game is a first-class cat-and-mouse game with Molly as pawn. Jaffey eventually goes all in and clears a path for Molly’s redemption. But the feds aren’t his main obstacle; it is Molly herself.
In a performance reminiscent of last year’s box office disappointing Miss Sloane, Jessica Chastain is luminous. At times immovable and other times totally vulnerable, she plays Molly as vixen, villain, abuser, timid, sexy, brilliant, tough, compromised, and principled. It is absolutely one of the strongest performances of the year. Already one of the most sought-after actresses in world after her Oscar-nominated performances in Zero Dark Thirty and The Help, she was fantastic in The Martian and The Zookeeper’s Wife. While Miss Sloane was a disappointment, Chastain wasn’t. And Molly’s Game is very likely to land her another Oscar nod.
This is a rich look into the world of high stakes poker played by guys with too much money on their hands and a ruthless sense of self-destruction. That Molly gets pulled into this world then finds it exhilarating, exhausting, demeaning and destructive is engrossing.
Molly’s Game is likely to garner Oscar buzz for the film, both lead actors’ performances, for the script and perhaps first-time director Aaron Sorkin. This is one of the most anticipated films of the year due to Sorkin’s debut behind the camera. The famed author of The Social Network, Moneyball, Steve Jobs, Charlie Wilson’s War, A Few Good Men and, of course, The West Wing, Sorkin is a Hollywood wunderkind who calls all of the shots in Molly’s Game.
And while he makes some rookie mistakes (it is too long; he fell in love with his own script), Sorkin manages to make you fall in love with Molly and her many games.