Review: Molly’s Game

Molly’s Game (15)

USA 2017 140 mins  Dir: Aaron Sorkin Cast: Jessica Chastain, Idris Elba, Kevin Costner, Michael Cera, Chris O’Dowd

Gab, gab, gab…voiceovers, dense conversation, impenetrable gambling jargon: the chatter never stops in Molly’s Game. No prizes for guessing that it’s an Aaron Sorkin movie, though it is perhaps a surprise that this is The West Wing creator and The Social Network writer’s directorial debut. He takes to it like, well, a washed-up former competitive skier to running high-stakes underground poker games. Which, as it turns out, is very well indeed, confidently juggling three time frames. This may be one of the talkiest movies of recent years, but it’s also consistently entertaining, with Jessica Chastain and Idris Elba proving more than equal to the enormous mouthfuls of rapid-fire dialogue gifted to them by Mr. Sorkin. Until, that is, a baffling last reel capitulation to the kind of sappy cod psychology that one might expect from a lesser writer of a much cheesier Hollywood movie.

In scenes that speak bigly to the binary Trump’s America of winners’n’losers, a brisk pre-credits sequence establishes both the tone and theme of the film as teenage Molly is egged on by her tough-as-old boots psychologist father (Costner) to succeed in the world of competitive skiing, until a freak accident puts paid to these ambitions. We then leap forward to find the adult Molly’s (Chastain) door being kicked in by the FBI, years after publication of her memoir. Sorkin proceeds to fill in the gaps, telling the extraordinary story of how she moved to LA and became, to use the unimprovable title of her autobiography, “the 26-Year-Old Woman Behind the Most Exclusive, High-Stakes Underground Poker Game in the World”. Every so often, the film nips back to her childhood to explore the increasingly rebellious Molly’s difficult relationship with her father, while in the present day she recruits initially reluctant, upstanding attorney Charlie Jaffey (Idris Elba) to represent her.

A combination of crime flick and courtroom drama, with a side order of big business and Hollywood glamour, all served up with plenty of backroom politicking, Molly’s Game certainly sees Sorkin playing to his strengths. After last year’s somewhat awkward Miss Sloane, Jessica Chastain has cornered the market in smart women running rings round powerful men, while hinting at the sacrifices they make along the way. Here, Molly seems to have no life outside the game, whose pressures eventually lead to drug addiction, as she expertly relieves the (male, odious) super-rich of eye-watering wads of cash during expertly choreographed unlicensed poker games in swanky hotel rooms. As in her memoir, no names are actually named but you’re only a Google search away from the discovering the alleged identity of the loathsome Hollywood actor played by Michael Cera who hangs her out to dry in LA, forcing her relocation to New York.

Idris Elba is equally impressive as the attorney who takes Molly’s case when it turns out that the FBI plan to include her in a mob indictment unless she turns over her hard drives, effectively spilling the beans about her clients. Sorkin even gives him a big rousing, noble monologue about the iniquity of their strategy. Indeed, one of the cleverest tricks the film pulls off is to have us rooting for its plucky, resourceful heroine, even though we’re never really offered an explanation as to why we should do so. Her claims not to know that ruthless Russian mobsters are gathered round her gaming table are especially unconvincing. This gives it the feel of a warmer companion piece to Adam McKay’s equally dense, jargon-heavy and eminently quotable The Big Short, which felt no obligation to ask us to like any of its characters, and may lead the uncharitable to feel that punches are being pulled. But even though the soggy ending feels unworthy of Sorkin, this is a cracking yarn that barely pauses for breath as it rattles though its 140 minutes.