Molly's Game (2017)

[AimingforYoko]

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The true story of Molly Bloom, an Olympic-class skier who ran the world's most exclusive high-stakes poker game and became an FBI target.

This is pretty much full Sorkin, and Jessica Chastain handles the Sorkinese pretty deftly. Other than Chastain, the standouts are Idris Elba as her Attorney, Kevin Costner as her dad (although a conversation between the two of them late in the flick is the only clunker) and Michael Cera as Tobey MaguirePlayer X.

[choclatechip45]

I enjoyed it. I could have done without the dad sub plot since I didn't think it added much. Jessica Chastain and Idris Elba are fantastic.

[Sandman]

I'm okay being the sentimentalist in the group, and I thought the scene for Chastain and Kevin Costner on the park bench was an emotional payoff that worked pretty well -- not a clunker for me (but very much in line with Sorkin parent-child reconciliations we've come to know). I thought the cast was solid all the way through, Chastain and Idris Elba being the standouts.

I counted at least two references to SN or TWW -- three if you count Molly's description of Circe as the "Greek goddess of magic," which she wasn't. (Thespis is in the building?)

Edited January 5, 2018 by Sandman

[Proclone]

I saw it last night and I thought it was excellent.  Full disclosure, I'm a big fan of Sorkin.  There really hasn't been much he's done that I haven't liked on some level.  I even kind of liked of Studio 60, even if I acknowledge it wasn't the best.  And Molly Bloom (I haven't read the book yet, so I don't what changes were made) seems tailor-made to be a Sorkin protagonist.  Exceptionally smart, and talented person who does unsavory (but not too unsavory) things, but is ultimately a very moral person and when the cards are down (no pun intended) does the right thing.  I think that describes most of the characters that have populated Sorkin's various projects.  That's not a criticism, as I said I like Sorkin, it in fact probably works in favor of the movie that Molly is the kind of character Sorkin likes to write about.  And as much as Sorkin gets criticised for his writing of woman (some of which I totally agree with BTW), I thought he did a good job making Molly an interesting, well-rounded character without falling into his usual pitfalls when writing woman.

I'm of two minds about but having her reconcile with her dad at the end.  I agree part of that conversation was clunky, but I thought the part where her dad broke down crying about her being assaulted was very well acted by Costner and Chastain and felt real to me.  On the other hand, while I'm sure that Molly's real-life relationship with her father was more complicated than what we saw in this film, her father as shown in this movie was emotionally abusive IMO.  And I honestly don't think having a three-minute conversation on a bench is enough to have her forgive him for that abuse.  I wish she had really called him on the abuse and I wish they let her remain estranged from him.  I hate to psychoanalyze Sorkin, and I don't know what his father did or didn't do to him, but I think he needs to stop trying to work it out through his characters.  It doesn't take Fraud to see there are some serious daddy issues there.

Chastain and Elba were excellent at handling the Sorkin dialogue and just excellent in general.  And I really enjoyed the rest of the cast as well, I thought Chris O'Dowd was especially funny.  I just overall really enjoyed the movie, I thought it was the right mix of funny and dramatic.  And as a side note, I thought the casting was of the young Molly was really good, as the girl looked a lot like Chastain.

[Hybridcookie]

On ‎08‎/‎01‎/‎2018 at 6:14 PM, Proclone said:

Chastain and Elba were excellent at handling the Sorkin dialogue and just excellent in general.  And I really enjoyed the rest of the cast as well, I thought Chris O'Dowd was especially funny.  I just overall really enjoyed the movie, I thought it was the right mix of funny and dramatic.  And as a side note, I thought the casting was of the young Molly was really good, as the girl looked a lot like Chastain.

 

Chris O'Dowd - that's who it was. I recognised him but I couldn't place him. I did see a few actors I recognised in small roles Joe Keery (Stranger Things), Justin Kirk (Weeds), Natalie Krill (Wynonna Earp), Brian D'Arcy James.

I liked the film, I like Sorkin's writing and I thought the acting was good - especially the two leads, but I think it was a bit too long.

[annzeepark914]

Haven't seen it yet but plan to.  I read the excerpt from her book in Vanity Fair a while back and was appalled by the obnoxious and cruel behavior of one well known actor who taunted her to dance on a table for them. Is this scene in the movie?  Does one have to be a poker player to fully appreciate the movie?

[Steph J]

2 hours ago, annzeepark914 said:

Haven't seen it yet but plan to.  I read the excerpt from her book in Vanity Fair a while back and was appalled by the obnoxious and cruel behavior of one well known actor who taunted her to dance on a table for them. Is this scene in the movie?  Does one have to be a poker player to fully appreciate the movie?

No and no. I've never played a game of poker in my life and found the movie greatly entertaining. It's not really about poker, it's more about power.

[Lonesome Rhodes]

I read the book and liked it very much.  The movie was too much about Molly and her psyche, including daddy issues.

The book (real) Molly was/is far more savvy than the smart and too incurious movie Molly.

The frequent flashbacks were much too jarring and far too frequent.  Several of these sequences dragged on seemingly forever.  Molly was basically presented as desperate to make bank and eager to be a part of the Hollywood milieu.  Plenty of motivation on display and entirely understandable.  Why all the effort to show us childhood moments of importance?  

Just as each Molly was a loner and fiercely independent, so too were any notions of my caring a whit about her.  I respect(ed) her acumen and guts.  I never liked her.

A major plot point within the movie unwittingly damns the movie itself:  Naming names.  The movie refuses to do so, despite the fact there are tons of them in the book.  Everytime the issue arose, I was angered the movie was gutless.

The poker was well done.  They found a pretty good middle ground where lifers and novices would each get something from those scenes.  There's an important scene where a player absorbs a horrid bad beat (unbelievably rotten luck) which was a clear highlight for me.

Costner grew on me and by the end, I was sold on him, and on his character (Daddy).  If you are a fan, by all means watch this movie.  

The bottom line is I can't recommend this movie of itself.  Sorkin typically does not develop the depth required for us to recognize and connect with the leads.  Highly intelligent and ambition, they are.  Human beings?  Not so much.

[annzeepark914]

6 hours ago, Lonesome Rhodes said:

The bottom line is I can't recommend this movie of itself.  Sorkin typically does not develop the depth required for us to recognize and connect with the leads.  Highly intelligent and ambition, they are.  Human beings?  Not so much.

Thanks for the review, Lonesome Rhodes. Think I'm going to give it a pass.  Also, Sorkin has a reputation for injecting lots of fast talking in his dramas which I find so irritating (somebody once said that he comes from a family of fast talkers, the kind of folks where you can never get a word in).  One thought about not using names of the real people who came to the games:  could the producers have been sued?  She mentions names in her book (which was a bit shocking).

[Joimiaroxeu]

I think it easily could've been 30 minutes shorter. It seemed to me like the skiing stuff was included so that the movie would look less like a filmed play. And as a longtime fan of Idris Elba, I was quite distracted by his nose. I kept wondering whether it was a prosthetic because it seemed bigger and more bulbous than usual. Maybe they didn't want him to be more attractive than Jessica, hah, hah.

[Lonesome Rhodes]

I'm certain that supercilious and punctilious attorneys prevailed upon TPTB to not name names.  However, as you mention, the book does.  

The worst example?  The game actually began at the infamous, and now defunct, Viper Room in Hollyweird.  What does the movie call it?  The Cobra Room.  Puhleeeeeaze!  

I am truly confused as to why the Four Seasons and The Plaza and other luxury properties were cited.  It's ridiculous.

[Sandman]

On 1/10/2018 at 2:16 AM, Lonesome Rhodes said:

Sorkin typically does not develop the depth required for us to recognize and connect with the leads.  Highly intelligent and ambition, they are.  Human beings?  Not so much.

Mileage varies here. This is not a problem I've ever had with Sorkin.

[Empress1]

Definitely half an hour too long. Chastain and Elba do well with Sorkin's trademark dialogue. I was like, "Girl, take the deal and name names. Those wealthy men would have rolled on you in a second, especially if it meant they could get their money back." I'm curious about the names but not enough to read the book, though I've heard Michael Cera's Player X is Tobey Maguire.

[Traveller519]

Considering my biggest nits with the movie were the skiing scene at the beginning, I thought the overall movie was really well done.

I think Chastain and Elba did the best job of turning in performances that made Sorkin's script not sounds like traditional Sorkin Dialogue since Jack Nicholson. There were only a few parts where it slipped in that it came across as Sorkin dialogue, but the fact that I noticed that speaks to how well they did with the knowledge. That said, it's too bad that the tale really required so much voice-over narration as it was a little distracting at times.

While there may have been legal implications for not using actual names, the choice to not use them is quite obviously one of the points of the film. One of the themes of the film was how the salaciousness of Molly's actions were what drove her indictment. The prosecutors hoped that it would draw more eyeballs to the case. The film is decrying the pervasiveness of celebrity gossip not only as published "news" but as a nefarious use to solicit attraction. The script can't simultaneously decree that gossip, both implicitly and and explicitly, and also get off on naming names. The number of "the real stories behind Molly's Game" articles out there, which are simple re-telling of the anecdotes in her book speak to this.

But the film is Molly's story, and it's an incredible story. She saw an opportunity to monetize something that was already happening by providing an experience, and built herself an incredible business. It's something that seems so obvious and apparent, but she was the one who applied a little common sense to a meathead meetup and just enough allure to turn it into an enterprise, but her passion pushed her to the point of blindess, something we can all relate to on some level.

It certainly ranks right along Moneyball and The Social Network for entertainment, and will likely be just as re-watchable as those films.

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Okay, who wants to hear ski nits?!?!

It's important to know that Molly didn't actually crash in qualifying for the Olympics. She just wrapped up her time in the sport having achieved as much as she could, but that's nowhere near as dramatic.

First, a moguls course is nowhere near 52 degrees. That Deer Valley Course she was on sits at just over 26 degrees, which is the average course slope across FIS mogul courses. It admittedly doesn't sound all that impressive, but that's because ski slopes never do. The most significant slope you would see at most ski resorts normally top out at about 46 degrees. anything above 50 degrees really struggles to hold snow.

Her flip on the top jump, which she describes as a "D-spin" is actually just a crossed-up back flip. A D-spin requires, as the name suggests, involves rotation in the trick. It's more off-axis. But the bigger piece here, is that inverted tricks (where your feet go higher than your head while you're in the air) weren't allowed by FIS until 2005.

Finally, there's no way one of those boughs would have been able to dislodge a boot set at a DIN of 15. There's really no way for it to interfere with the binding system and at the speeds and forces would have been much more likely to just be dislodged than catch anything in her bidning.

That said, it all amounts to about 3 minutes of the film. It's just the stuff I know

Edited January 16, 2018 by Traveller519

[Shannon L.]

On 1/5/2018 at 6:41 AM, Sandman said:

I'm okay being the sentimentalist in the group, and I thought the scene for Chastain and Kevin Costner on the park bench was an emotional payoff that worked pretty well -- not a clunker for me (but very much in line with Sorkin parent-child reconciliations we've come to know).

I'll be sentimental with you.  I loved that scene.

On 1/8/2018 at 10:14 AM, Proclone said:

 I thought the part where her dad broke down crying about her being assaulted was very well acted by Costner and Chastain and felt real to me. 

I think Costner nailed the emotions during that part of the discussion.  I was impressed.

I loved this movie.  I guess I have to officially consider myself a Sorkin fan now, since I don't think there's any show of his that I've seen that I didn't like.  I thought Jessica and Edris did a great job in their roles and agree with @Sandman that the whole cast was solid.

I see where it could have been shorter, but I didn't mind the length--I was captivated enough by the performances and dialog that it didn't feel long to me.

[Chaos Theory]

Its funny people keeping saying this could have been shorter.  I thought it could have been at least 30 minutes longer.  I have no clue why people think this was too long.  Maybe because I didn’t read the book but this went by like a shot for me.  

It  was also interesting enough that I did some reasearch.  I didn’t  know that the main poker guy played by Michael Cera, who I have never liked before, was based on Toby Maguire.  That was an interesting bit of information.  

Edited July 27, 2018 by Chaos Theory

[topanga]

On 7/27/2018 at 9:02 AM, Chaos Theory said:

Its funny people keeping saying this could have been shorter.  I thought it could have been at least 30 minutes longer.  I have no clue why people think this was too long.  Maybe because I didn’t read the book but this went by like a shot for me.  

It  was also interesting enough that I did some reasearch.  I didn’t  know that the main poker guy played by Michael Cera, who I have never liked before, was based on Toby Maguire.  That was an interesting bit of information.  

The book names several celebrities who played in her games: such as Tobey Maguire, Ben Affleck, Alex Rodríguez, Nelly, and Leonardo DiCaprio. The only one she bad-mouthed was Tobey, but it sounds like he really was/is a big jerk. 

I like that the movie told us the story beyond her initial arrest. Because that’s where the book ended.

Chastian and Idris Elba were great. Their relationship was hard to figure out, though. On the one hand, he had an almost fatherly concern for her and her case. But then when they talked in person, they were almost flirty with one another. Nothing inappropriate or unethical, mind you. The actors just had good chemistry with one another.  Almost too good. 

 

On 1/15/2018 at 2:09 PM, Traveller519 said:

Finally, there's no way one of those boughs would have been able to dislodge a boot set at a DIN of 15. There's really no way for it to interfere with the binding system and at the speeds and forces would have been much more likely to just be dislodged than catch anything in her bidning.

That said, it all amounts to about 3 minutes of the film. It's just the stuff I know

 I know nothing about skiing, but I totally understand how you feel. It’s painful to be an expert at something and watch a movie or TV show do it all wrong.