The House Sometimes Wins

Poker is a game I rather enjoy. I'm not that great at it -- I understand the odds, and I can make some good plays, but I have too many tells that I give my game away to someone of a higher skill level -- but it's a game that's fun to play with other people just to toss a couple of bucks around and have some fun. I've grown to enjoy stories about poker players, and other gamblers, as well, and I find myself watching films that track casino games, and poker more specifically, that I would have expected. I blame Rounders, a film that made poker playing look cool, although the Bravo TV series Celebrity Poker Showdown was also an enjoyable and very watchable time. That pretty much cemented it for me.

I took notice of Molly's Game, a 2017 biographical film written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, because of its subject matter: underground poker games. I won't deny I was a little wary because of Sorkin's attachment to the film as he's a writer that can be hit or miss depending on the subject at hand. Still, with solid performances by Jessica Chastain and Idris Elba, as well as a script that doesn't lean too hard into the standard Sorkin-isms, Molly's Game ended up being a movie that sucked me in. It's a solid drama that moves at a steady clip, with a lead protagonist that's really worth watching.

The film opens in the early days of real athlete Molly Bloom's Olympic career. Bloom (Chastain) is at the U.S. qualifiers to clinch her spot on the U.S. Olympic team, but a horrific accident during her run (after already having a previous horrific injuring that required rebuilding her entire back) shut her out of the competition. Realizing she needed a change of pace, Molly moved to L.A.. She took a job as a bottle service girl at a night club which put her in touch with moguls and stars. That's where she met Dean Keith (Jeremy Strong), a real estate developer, who brings her on at his company to be his 24/7 assistant. This then soon grows into running his after hours poker game at the Viper Club, a job to takes to with relish. She starts running the whole of the game, upgrading the experience and making the players feel welcome, to the point that it's no longer Keith's game by Molly's, so he fires her.

At this point Molly, angry and not wanting to let go of a new career that's been making her pretty solid income, starts her own high end and very exclusive game. She teams up with one of the Viper regulars, a player she only ever identifies as Player X (Michael Cera), and he brings in the players while she runs her very effective game. When he, too, grows tired of letting her have all the glory he shuts her out. So she moves to New York and starts and even more exclusive, and high paying, game. Her business grows, but so do her connections to the illegal side of gambling. Soon the Russians are sniffing around, and this is then followed by he Feds. It's only with the help of lawyer Charlie Jaffey that Molly even has a chance of avoiding a long prison term as part of a wide-reaching and extensive RICO investigation. Is Molly a criminal mastermind or just someone with her fingers a little too deep in the pie?

The film never really questions if Molly is a criminal or not. She is, but not at the level of the people she dealt with. She ran a perfectly aboveboard poker game for months before finally breaking the law a little by taking a thin cut of the money on the table (which is illegal in the U.S.). She also did drugs, mostly to stay awake during her long nights running her games, but she was never a mob boss, nor did she whore our her servers, sell drugs, or do anything else the gangsters and mobsters who frequented her club.

In short, the film does what it can to paint Molly in as good of a light as is possible. She's not guilt free, for sure, but the crimes leveled against her are overblown, as per the film, and the drama of the whole story thus comes from if she'll end up paying a high price for the "small crimes" she committed (although you can go read the real athlete's wiki page to find out all that). For a story based on a real person, Sorkin's film does a solid job of mining high drama from mundane details. Just like he did with The West Wing, and with The Social Network. In this way the film feels perfectly Sorkin-esque.

However, in ways that aren't quite so flattering the film also feels rather Sorkin-esque. The best part of Sorkin's films are the snappy dialogue and character patter, which is on display here (never better than between Chastain and Elba). However, Sorkin has a tendency to tell tales from the male perspective. His men are nuanced, flawed, and interesting, but his women are almost never as interesting. They either come off as shrill shrews or have to be saved by their men. Molly's Game, despite being about Molly Bloom, is really about the men around her and how to react to her, screwing her over or saving her, while Molly herself ends up riding along in the wake.

That's not to diminish what she did. A reading between the lines shows how much Bloom was able to create on her own, going from one poker game to the next, upgrading each time and learning all she could about the world she was submerged in. But the film never really lets us truly into her head even with her acting as the narrator. The most character development we get is when she's reacting to the men around her, defining herself through them and not how she really wants to be. She knocks herself as "dressing up as the Penthouse version of herself", but the film doesn't even give us more than that at any point in the story.

A charitable reading would say, "hey, Poker is a male-dominated sport." And while that is true there are plenty of female players in the game, and not just at the professional level. Yet we never see any women play at Molly's games. She has female employees, ones who only ever remain single note characters there to drive this or that plot point forward, but there aren't any really developed female characters in the game, or as her friends, or anywhere else in the film. The movie seems uninterested in any of the women in the film instead really wanting to focus on the men around Molly. Hell, she has both a mother and a father in this film, with the dad played by Kevin Costner, but while the dad is deeply explored and mother just... exists. Speaks strongly to the weird gender dynamics of this film.

Despite this, the film is very watchable and that's entirely due to Chastain carrying this film. While the script isn't too interested in her as a character, Chastain invests deeply in Molly and conveys so much about the character through her own presentation. Mannerisms, body movement, and line deliveries are come together, executed by Chastain to make Molly a magnetic presence. We never really get into her head the way we should but Chastain does everything she can to make us care about her character. She delivers the protagonist to her film despite the script's best efforts.

What this says to me, more than anything, is that for all the flaws of Sorkin as a screenwriter, he should be credited as a director for knowing when to let his actors (and actresses) take over the film. He could have been didactic with the script, focusing on the lines and not letting the characters breathe, but he figured out how to work with Chastain and let her carry this film. That was the right move because this is really her vehicle, not his.

Molly's Game is flawed, but in a way you might not have noticed upon first watching. It was only when I sat back and thought about the film that I really started to notice just where the film was really focusing its efforts. It made for a breezy watch, despite its dramatic story beats, creating a film almost as magnetic as Chastain's performance. It's probably not a film you're going to want to watch again, not once you start to pick it apart, but for a solid afternoon watch, Molly's Game delivers the poker action and backroom drama it promises. It's a pity its grasp of the main character wasn't better.