In The Ecology of Money, Richard Douthwaite explains that our money system encourages dishonesty, in part because our money is not a good store of value. Molly’s Game, based on a true story, is a good example of this.
In Aaron Sorkin’s directorial debut, Jessica Chastain is Molly Bloom, an Olympic hopeful who instead found fame running a notorious poker game that brought her to the attention of the FBI.
★★★★☆
After an unfortunate accident on the ski slopes dashes her hopes of making it to the Olympics, Molly’s life lacks direction. She moves to Los Angeles and takes a job as a cocktail waitress and another job as an office assistant for the arrogant and loathsome jerk Dean Keith (Jeremy Strong).
But the office assistant job leads to another job, managing a high-stakes poker game for celebrities at the Cobra Lounge. Molly keeps track of the players’ buy-ins, but she also pays attention to the game. She’s a quick study of human behavior, and before Dean can cut her out of the games, she cuts him out first, and moves the games to a classier venue.
However, Molly fails to see the treachery of Player X (Michael Cera) coming. Player X, widely believed to be Tobey Maguire, cuts Molly out. She’s upset, but then she resolves to start her own poker game in New York, with higher stakes, and, more importantly, better vetting of the players and staff.
So far, Molly has never taken a “rake.” That’s when the dealer surreptitiously takes a few chips off the table when the pot gets too rich for the house. I don’t need to explain what a pot is, right? Casinos take rakes all the time, but for Molly’s dealer to do it runs afoul of federal law.
I don’t want to give the impression that this movie tells the story in a straight line. It’s actually one of those movies that constantly switches between two time periods, and presumably the straight line narrative can be reconstructed by something along the lines of taking the odd numbered scenes and following them by the even numbered scenes.
Early on in the movie, we see Molly get arrested by a heavily armed FBI team. She hasn’t run a game in two years, but federal prosecutors still want to throw the book at her.
I generally prefer movies that the tell the story in a straight line, but I think here Sorkin successfully pulls off the nonlinear narrative.
It works in part because Molly is telling the story to her lawyer, Charlie Jaffey (Idris Elba). The lawyer learns the story first from the tabloids, then from Molly’s book, Molly’s Game, and then from Molly herself.
It should be noted that Jaffey is a fictional character only loosely based on Bloom’s actual lawyer. I think this is an acceptable poetic license so as to not complicate the screenplay with more details than can be properly addressed in two hours.
The movie runs 140 minutes. Generally, a movie should not run more than 120 minutes. However, in this case, although I can think of a couple of scenes I would have cut, I’m not sure it’s possible to bring this movie down under two hours in a way that makes sense.
The movie has extensive voice-over, which is another thing I generally don’t like, but here it works. This is a very well-put together movie that moves so fast it doesn’t feel like it’s longer than two hours.
Molly’s Game is rated R for “language, drug content and some violence.” In particular, the scene in which Molly’s beaten up by a mafia thug is painful to watch, but essential to the story (presumably it happened in real life, otherwise it would be gratuitous violence towards a woman). Even without that scene this is not a movie I’d recommend watching with children.
The DVD has just one special feature: a 3-minute mini-doc which, apart from a few clips of the actual Molly Bloom, doesn’t really have anything that you wouldn’t already know from watching the movie.
Even though you can look it up on Google easily enough, I suppose it would be a spoiler to tell you the disposition of her federal court case. It might be an illustration of the Martha Stewart effect: women who commit white collar crimes are zealously prosecuted, while most of the men get away scot-free.
Wall Street is full of crooked men who have so far completely escaped accountability for their crimes. And if a white man commits a white collar crime so blatant and brazen that he winds up in federal prison, he might just get a pardon from the emoluments crook in the White House.