Best Gambling Movies #23 (Molly’s Game)
My new writing series, “Best Gambling Movies of All Time” continues with #23 — “Molly’s Game”
Title and Year: Molly’s Game (2017)
Director: Aaron Sorkin
Actors: Jessica Chastain, Idris Elba, Kevin Costner
Synopsis: An ambitious and opportunistic young woman runs illegal high-stakes poker games and becomes increasingly absorbed in scandal and danger.
After finally seeing Molly’s Game, which was writer-producer Aaron Sorkin’s long-anticipated 2017 directorial debut following many years of toiling away as Hollywood’s most acclaimed screenwriter, I’m now thoroughly convinced he could script his next movie based on watching paint dry and still somehow manage to make it into a riveting drama.
Sorkin’s previous credits included all of the powerful dialogue in numerous episodes of The West Wing and The Newsroom in addition to hit movies including A Few Good Men, The Social Network, Steve Jobs, Moneyball, and most recently The Trial of the Chicago 7. His decision to take a marginally successful book based on something as negligible as backroom poker games surprised almost everyone given he’d tradmarked so much other weighty material.
A partially-true if exaggerated tale constructed on the fragile foundation of a painstakingly unreadable book published in 2015 of the same title, Sorkin manages to do what I suspected was impossible — make sweet lemonade from a sour lemon. With a considerable squeeze from his lead actor playing Molly, he transforms a brassy Heidi Fleiss-like protagonist into a sophisticated and even sympathetic role model/movie hero.
Buoyed by this perfect casting move, Sorkin toys with our minds and ultimately wins over our hearts. The engaging screenplay delivers many morsels of rapid-fire staccato dialogue, but it’s the convincing performances which end up coercing us to cheer her rise and console her inevitable downfall. She becomes a pawn within a murky world she knows but doesn’t fully understand. In the end, no one can control the cards when the deck was already stacked.
Molly’s Game doesn’t seem to be a story attractive to mainstream audiences, but Jessica Chastain takes all the sharp tools she’s given and cuts every scene to shreds. Chastain, who was so good in a number of other film roles (The Help, Zero Dark Thirty, The Martian, Interstellar, A Most Violent Year), broadens her range even further here in a more understated performance, which is difficult to pull off. She’s tough but sensitive, cooly calculating but also sympathetic.
Idris Elbe, Molly’s high-priced New York attorney is her equal onscreen, and that’s really saying something. Meanwhile, Kevin Costner who looks like he just walked off the set of Field of Dreams is cast as Molly’s demanding father, and while he’s not to be faulted for the performance, his inclusion at all seems rather unecessary. Scripting Costner into the story is puzzling, especially since none of the conflicts between father and daughter about love and acceptance was ever mentioned in the book. Presumably, Sorkin felt the need to make Molly more complex and perhaps better understood through this strained relationship with her father. However, I found it to be a bore and one of the movie’s few flaws.
The poker scenes, and more important, the tension of high-stakes action and Machiavellian atmosphere of underground games are accurately portrayed. Molly’s Game (actually games, with an S, since she ran them first in Los Angeles and later in New York) included Hollywood moguls, moviestars and sports stars, business titans, and finally, unbeknownst to her at the time, the Russian mafia. That’s the ugly river card in this poker drama that will eventually break and leave a lot of people in pain.
I didn’t expect to enjoy Molly’s Game as much as I did (in all honestly, I gave it 50-50 that I’d walk out of theater). Expectations were surpassed thanks entirely to an absorbing script and even better onscreen performances from the two charismatic leads. This was quite an achievement given the lowly foundation of the source material. So, it belongs among my Top 25 best gambling films — at #23.
Worst Gambling Movies
#25 My Daughter’s Secret Life (2001)
Best Gambling Movies
TAG: Best movies about gambling
TAG: Nolan Dalla writings
POSTSCRIPT–I received this comment from Josh Leichner: READ MORE HERE
Agreed…the parlaying of props to that extent….takes a lot of creative privilege…and Hollywood storytelling…..but being a bookie….in its defense….they kind of portrayed them as bets taken by a guy that looked like he would decide what action to take no matter how preposterous…..and it was in an era (early 2000s) that was void of internet betting….and just seemed like said bookie would listen to what you wanted….wrote in his little “book” and said O.K. its a “bet” with a warning telling you “its your funeral buddy”. But I can say this….. as you know…..I was the poker consultant on “Mollys Game”….. I spent 3 months on set told to correct the laziness in the script….we had a scene chalk full of short raises….string betting….and real awkward betting amounts…. I.e. the famous 1.3million pot at the flop….with a continuation bet of 100k. I’ve heard it all…..the tweets….the criticism….”you had one job…..” detailed in the attached peice….I can tell you the director wanted authenticity for sure….but vetoed me on that scene…..citing that people wouldn’t care. Well I was my job… I CARED. It was oversight and laziness. He told me only the gambling geeks would scrutinize. Wasn’t my place to say “then why not be all the way authentic”?
What i can say first hand is that…when youre on set….youre on studio time, you’ve got about 13 hours a day to get it done. Scenes are sought to be completed in one day…start to finish…with about 25 takes each so that they have a ton of clips to string together. One had perfect lighting….one shot had perfect sound….another had a great actor facial expression…..one scene strung together from 25 different takes from usually 3 angles. Thats 75 takes of the same shit…..to get one peiced together perfect scene.(or as perfect as you can get).
Now imagine all that work….with producers (the ones paying for the studio time and the crew to work) breathing down the annoying artists neck (the director) to get the job done yesterday. Script supervisor sitting there making sure lines are perfect….(who are gambling illiterate)…. my point is with all that pressure….even with the “know how” on set (me)…. at some point, when you’ve calculated the hundred degrees and different duties of care present on set, the gambling authenticity really seems like the opposite of a big deal. I CARED. I fought for it. I had ONE job…..and was often made to feel less than important in the scope of it. But since this post singles out the laziness and dismissive attitude to our craft….like my role on set with that project…..all of the sudden it seems way more important that they make it seem, and I’m so glad someone takes the time to call them out. It kind of vindicates me and my efforts.
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