Molly's Game review: Goodfellas with cosmopolitans, and a side order of feminism
Dir: Aaron Sorkin; Starring: Jessica Chastain, Idris Elba, Kevin Costner, Jon Bass, Michael Cera, Chris O'Dowd. 15 cert, 140 mins.
Molly Bloom’s story has it all: Russian mobsters, FBI bust-ins, push-up bras and cash. Millions and millions of it. The heroine of Molly’s Game was on track to be an Olympic skiing champion, until a freak accident took her out of the race, and a very different career ensued, as she inched her way, stack-heeled, into running the most infamous high-stakes poker game in Hollywood.
A-list stars from Leonardo DiCaprio to Ben Affleck wanted in on the action. And then, in a flurry of scandal and racketeering charges, it all came crashing down.
It’s one of those rise-and-fall arcs so beloved of American biopics – think Goodfellas with cosmopolitans, and a side order of feminist push-back against the reeking sexism of this rich boys’ club. Adapting Bloom’s tell-all memoir, Aaron Sorkin makes his directing debut, and his script throws the kitchen sink at it: you certainly get your money’s worth of strutting Sorkinese and cute interrogative banter. You also get your money’s worth of Jessica Chastain in sequins, commodifying her whole look to play along with the male fantasy she’s selling.
Sorkin has taken a fair number of liberties with Molly’s story – her real-life lawyer was a white guy called Jim Walden, but here he’s Charlie Jaffey (Idris Elba), a smooth operator not exactly chomping at the bit to handle her defence.
Sorkin-y to the core, their dynamic is one of the film’s real plus points: more so than Molly’s vexed relationship with her dad (Kevin Costner), which clogs up the works quite badly, and adds a whole half-hour onto the running time it didn’t particularly need.
Whether we’re lawyering up or narrating the drama of a night’s play, it’s hard to miss Sorkin’s writing, but he has yet to find an equivalently distinctive style behind the camera. Beyond a flashy prologue explaining how Molly’s accident occurred, the film is put together with secondhand panache – dabs of Scorsese everywhere you look, in a predictable Casino/Wolf of Wall Street vein.
It gets by, but it’s often akin to high-quality TV, missing the thrilling melancholy and top-flight showmanship that really made The Social Network – knocked for six by David Fincher from one of Sorkin’s standout scripts – feel like a must-see.
Chastain, arguably, was even more fun in Miss Sloane, her underrated, equally stack-heeled gun-lobby drama from last year. Still, there are sections here that grab you by the lapel, and they’re almost always about watching the guys around the table, waiting for the gloat, the mistake or the fateful tell about to turn the room cold.
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Michael Cera plays an unnamed superhero actor, Player X, a composite character at least partly based on Tobey Maguire – Bloom’s most notorious client – whose controlling, show-offy antics and evil entitlement are wittily imagined.
And there’s a hidden triumph in the supporting cast from the always-reliable character actor Bill Camp (Black Mass, Midnight Special), whose spectacular, hideously convincing wipe-out as a guy called Harlan Eustice, in the course of a single night, sets much of the plot in motion.
Forget the biographical backstory: the poker in Molly’s Game is the main reason to settle in, with Chastain keeping her eyes hawkishly on the prize, and whole careers hinging on a card-flip. It’s an addict’s paradise, about to be lost.
Molly's Game is released on January 1
