Ah, Aaron Sorkin.
There are Sorkin projects I like and even love–Sports Night, Moneyball, and The Social Network. These are good Sorkin. But there’s also bad Sorkin–nay, oh-God-help-us Sorkin–when he’s at his most egotistical and self-satisfied and has no collaborators with their own strong visions to balance him out. The Sorkin of The Newsroom. The Sorkin of Molly’s Game.
Molly’s Game, the 2017 biopic starring Jessica Chastain, is pure oh-God-help-us Sorkin.
Chastain, the help God has indeed given us, is very good in her well-deserved showcase role. She plays Molly Bloom, a one-time near-Olympian who, after an injury, rebuilds her life and becomes the “poker princess,” running private games with celebrity players and pots well into the millions; when the game comes crashing down around her, leaving her broke, indicted, and desperate, she turns to straight-arrow lawyer Charlie Jaffey (Idris Elba). Chastain gives Molly a compelling hard-shell exterior–tough and glittering but also slightly brittle–and an awkward gooey center. Wisely, she makes Molly’s private sense of honor part of both: it’s the bruised and vulnerable heart of her, but it’s also her only real armor as she deals with both setbacks and contempt. She and Elba have good rapport together, but his role–going from disapproving of Molly to practically nominating her for sainthood–is comparatively thankless and certainly far less complex than he deserves. Nevertheless, almost no one else can manage Elba’s simultaneously intense and laid-back charisma, and it makes him an extremely welcome presence here. There are also some deeply enjoyable minor players, like Brian d’Arcy James, Chris O’Dowd, Graham Greene, Bill Camp, and Jon Bass.
But aside from that, this is Sorkin Central. Characters spit statistics and definitions at each other, nitpicking and bickering about semantics without any dramatic payoff, like pedantic edging. We get documented test scores to prove how smart Molly is (though we’re asked to buy that she could never have guessed she had the Russian mob in her game, or that saying no to the Italian mob might have unforeseen consequences). Slut-shaming abounds. Any antagonists are weak, wrong, and unintelligent, and they never offer any genuine moral or philosophical opposition. Deadliest of all, no point is ever made once, and subtly, if it can be made eighteen times by beating your head in with a golf club. The film is so intent on bringing you around to seeing Molly as kind and principled–and so clearly convinced you initially believe (as I assume Sorkin did) she’s a shallow, money-grubbing slut (see above)–that it oversells its premise to nauseating levels. It can’t even show someone lying about her without flashing back to scenes disproving the lie: I know, movie! That only happened about half an hour ago, I can remember! Will you for once let me get outraged on my own, or make a judgment on my own, without backseat-driving my emotions? Will you please trim back the nearly omnipresent voiceover that obsessively explains and interprets all this for me, sucking all the air out of the room?
After I first watched this with a friend, I then inflicted it on my wife, because that’s what being a couple is all about. Afterwards, I asked her if our marriage could survive this. Her eventual answer was encouraging, but there was a long, long pause before it came. I’m on thin ice here.
Molly’s Game is streaming on Netflix, should you also want to risk your marriage.
