Review: Molly's Game

“A witty, thoroughly entertaining film that frames the story in an interesting way and keeps you invested throughout.”

Writer and first-time director Aaron Sorkin brings to the screen the true story of Molly Bloom. Whilst the story has been embellished somewhat, the story is fascinating and the way its told works well for the screen. Assisting in this of course, is a fantastic performance from the ever-reliable Jessica Chastain. She brings all the charisma and style that the role needs when she’s on top of her game and keeping a world full of powerful men under her spell, whilst also keeping Molly venerable and human enough that we can easily buy this character making the choices she makes.

The story begins with Molly’s young life as a competitive skier, under the tough direction of her father, played by Kevin Costner (building a reputation as a great actor for father figures to strong characters). The film successfully explains Molly’s motivations on multiple levels.

The part of the story that feels the most embellished for dramatic license, is the story involving Molly’s lawyer, played excellently by Idris Elba. Elba is used to give the audience a reason to find out Molly’s motives and tactics and also answer questions about why she did and didn’t do certain things, such as selling her debt list she had owing when she was in dire financial problems, or why she wouldn’t name names beyond a few named in her book. Molly is not presented as a perfect character, but she incredibly likeable and her witty exchanges with Elba add great punch and wit to the story without feeling forced. This allows Molly’s personality, the thing that must have been central to her success and ability to build the empire she built and managed to stay alive doing, to remain forefront in the story and not allow this to be a simple rise and fall story that we’ve seen a hundred times before. Perhaps the film presents her fight to keep her integrity right to the end a little bit too sugary, but it seems from my reading that the story is fairly accurately presented.

Sorkin’s direction is fantastic, especially for a first-time director. Apparently, having an Oscar winning director (Costner) in the cast helped, and he was very supportive of his young director.

I have only two criticisms of the film and they are very minor. The main issue I had was that the film builds up the plot very well in the first half and is fascinating and extremely entertaining. However, when Molly loses LA and has to restart in New York, the story stalls a little, as the momentum has been knocked down a peg, and we have to rebuild from scratch. The New York portion was also required to deal with the more emotional and violent portions of the story. Whilst it’s not the fault of the film, as that’s how the story happened, it did feel like a chunk of the movie’s personality was missing in the third act.

My second issue was very minor and I’m not really sure if I have a real issue with this or not and that is Michael Cera in the role of Player X. This character is portrayed as a huge movie star whom everyone will come and play against just because of who he is. However, I don’t know if Cera feels right in the role, despite his performance being fine overall, and he is important in a early setting to make Molly feel comfortable. It is rumoured that Player X was really Toby Maguire in real life, so maybe in some ways it works, as Maguire is somewhat similar to Cera in that he often plays soft, likeable personalities in his movies. However, I always felt it needed a sleazier or more A-list type actor to have the bravado that I felt the character probably should have had to attract the players who come to play him, and also I felt he needed an underlying nastiness that was hidden somewhere below the surface and Cera just felt a little too soft around the edges for it to fully work for me. But again, that could just be me.

Overall, it was a film that had us (my wife and I) really excited when we came out, buzzing with energy. During the film, both of us needed to go to the toilet, but we both said that we didn’t want to miss anything. This is a good sign for a film of this type. It might not be a film everyone feels reaches the high levels I felt it did, but for me, having seen All the Money In the World and The Darkest Hour already this month (all good films), this was the best of the three ‘based on a true story’ films so far, and it’s been a good month for those types of films.