Old Yorker

  • Molly’s Game

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Aaron Sorkin (2017)

    For a screenwriter, Aaron Sorkin has acquired an exceptionally high profile.  Steve Jobs (2015) was anticipated as a new Sorkin to almost the extent that it was a new Danny Boyle.  Now, at the age of fifty-six, Sorkin has become a writer-director with his adaptation of Molly Bloom’s 2014 memoir, Molly’s Game: From Hollywood’s Elite to Wall Street’s Billionaire Boys Club, My High-Stakes Adventure in the World of Underground Poker.  (Sorkin has become notorious for verboseness but even he knew to cut the words after the colon.)    Born in 1978 in Colorado, Molly Bloom comes from a family of high achievers.  Her father Larry is a professor of clinical psychology.  One of her younger brothers, Jeremy, is an Olympic and world champion skier.  According to Sorkin’s film, Molly herself was in contention for a place in the US ski team for the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics in 2002 when she suffered a bad fall in the final trials.  She decided to take time out before taking up a place to law school and headed for Los Angeles, where she worked as a cocktail waitress then as PA to a real estate agent, who also ran a high-stakes underground poker game.  Within a year, quick-learning Molly had taken her ex-boss’s big-name clients and was running what became LA’s (the world’s?) most exclusive poker game.  She later moved to New York City and repeated the trick.  She was arrested by the FBI in 2013 and charged with various offences relating to her gaming and financial activities.  She pleaded guilty at her trial the following year, expecting to receive a custodial sentence.  The judge handed down a year’s probation, a $1000 fine, and 200 hours of community service.

    Molly Bloom’s remarkable CV makes for a doubly boring film – boring, that is, in both subject matter and in how it’s been made.  One of the many virtues of Bennett Miller’s Moneyball (2011) was that its story and characters, also based on real events and people, were compelling enough to render irrelevant whether the viewer was interested in baseball.  Molly’s Game may be absorbing to poker connoisseurs but it’s liable to leave lay audiences cold, especially since Sorkin shows scant interest in the psychology of gambling or the pathology of gambling addiction.  It doesn’t help either that Bloom’s book (again according to Sorkin) largely refrained from naming names.  Her Wikipedia entry tells us that the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Affleck, Tobey Maguire and Macaulay Culkin were among the regulars at Bloom’s games.  They’re reduced on screen to ‘Player X, a composite character’ so that the film is a letdown even at movie à clef level. (In New York, the players also included big beasts of Wall Street and Russian mobsters.  This viewer wouldn’t recognise any names, real or pseudonymous, in those two groups.)  In retrospect, Moneyball seems atypical among Sorkin’s recent screenplays, including Charlie Wilson’s War (2007) and The Social Network (2010) before Steve Jobs.  The most obvious difference is that the writing credit for Moneyball was shared, with Steven Zaillian.  Whatever the explanation, Miller’s whole film moved at a tempo unlike the others and the characters didn’t all have the same wittily self-assertive, hyper-articulate voice – what is now the trademark Sorkin voice.

    It comes as no surprise that, with his hand on the tiller, Sorkin has opted for a narrative rhythm closer to The Social Network than to Moneyball  but he’s no David Fincher.  The director’s approach is clear from the start.  Molly’s voice on the soundtrack summarises the results of a survey of sports professionals and fans, which asked them to nominate what they considered the worst of all possible sporting outcomes; Sorkin accompanies references to specific sports with clips of these sports being played.  She then describes the major spinal surgery she underwent as a young teenager; illustrative diagrams appear on the screen.  There are plenty more visual aids of this kind in the 140 minutes to follow.  Sorkin, conscious of his reputation as a wordsmith and that cinema-is-a-primarily-visual-medium, seems to think all that’s necessary to make a genuine movie is to generate images at the same rate as dialogue.  Or, rather, in this case, monologue:  the script contains an awful lot of voiceover narrative from Molly.   Sometimes this imparts information to avoid the problem of dramatisation.   Sometimes it describes what’s already evident on the screen – and is therefore superfluous, though Sorkin may feel it’s vital for maintaining pace.  The voiceover certainly helps ensure that Molly’s Game is monotonous.

    Molly eventually breaks the law by doing what she resists doing for as long as possible – she takes a cut of the gambling pot, known as a ‘rake’, to insure against losses occurred when her players can’t or won’t settle their debts.  She insists throughout on not having sexual relations with the punters.  In fact, she doesn’t seem to have social or personal relationships of any kind outside her professional sphere; although we hear far too much from her on the soundtrack, Molly says nothing about choosing a life of poker purdah.  The tensions between her and her father are illustrated purely through a few flashbacks to her teenage years – until, that is, a climactic encounter between them in New York, shortly before Molly’s trial.

    This is the most bizarre episode in Molly’s Game, not least in how Larry and Molly come to meet at all.  She goes skating at a public rink and dashes around the ice at irresponsibly high speed until a collision knocks her to the ground.  As she gets her breath back, she sees her father at the barrier.  He says Molly’s mother told him where to find her.  The mother must be the family’s highest achiever of all – a clairvoyant – if she knew about her daughter’s impulse visit to the ice rink.  Mention of Mrs Bloom is also a reminder of how little we learn about Molly’s relations with her other parent.  Larry Bloom is, as well as an academic, a high-end psychotherapist.  He now tells his daughter that he’ll condense three years’ worth of therapy sessions into a few minutes.  She derides his initial suggestion that she gave up law school to run high-stakes poker games in order to have power over powerful men.  Later in the conversation, Larry admits this explanation was a red herring.  Aaron Sorkin seens at pains to show he’s well aware that simplistic psychoanalysis of a troubled soul is a laughable movie cliché.  Yet when Larry offers  different explanations for Molly’s chosen course and her hostility to him – she never came to terms with the accident that thwarted her Olympic skiing ambitions; as a five-year-old child, she ‘knew’ that Larry was ‘cheating on Mom’ – these tired ideas seem meant to be The Truth, and Larry’s tears of contrition touchingly sincere.

    Molly Bloom was in her mid-twenties when she got into poker and thirty-six when she went on trial.  Jessica Chastain, who plays her, is forty.  The age difference isn’t necessarily a problem – Chastain certainly passes for a woman in her early thirties – but her technical command has the effect of obscuring Molly’s extraordinary youth and Sorkin writes in a style designed to show off an actor’s technical command.  Chastain’s face sometimes expresses Molly’s anxieties but, for the most part, it’s her assurance as a performer that dominates.  The flashbacks to the combative but obviously vulnerable teenage Molly (Samantha Isler) serve only to emphasise the difference between this girl and the young woman incarnated by Chastain.  There’s no sense, for example, of Molly’s taking time to feel comfortable with power dressing:  she’s instantly at home in the high heels and low-cut dresses she wears.  As her lawyer Charlie Jaffey, Idris Elba at first raises hopes that his strong screen presence and his character’s (relative) reticence may help vary the tempo.  But Charlie soon becomes yet another dazzling motormouth and Elba delivers his big speeches – in a plea bargaining sequence with prosecution lawyers and a subsequent showdown with Molly – conventionally.   The cast also includes Kevin Costner as Molly’s father and, as the lenient judge, Graham Greene, whose best-known role was alongside Costner in Dances with Wolves.   The gamblers number, among many others, Bill Camp and Chris O’Dowd.  The DiCaprio et al composite is Michael Cera.  You have to admit that is an effective disguise.

    4 January 2018

  • To Joy

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Till glädje

    Ingmar Bergman (1950)

    It starts with an orchestra rehearsal of the last movement of Beethoven’s ninth symphony, from which the film takes its title.   One of the orchestra’s violinists, Stig Eriksson (Stig Olin), leaves the rehearsal to take an urgent phone call.   We know before Stig does – from the shocked expression of the man who first answers the phone, from the sound of crying issuing from the receiver that the man puts down while he goes to fetch Stig – that it’s bad news.  We soon learn that Stig’s wife Marta (Maj-Britt Nilssen) has died as the result of a domestic accident, the explosion of a paraffin stove, which also injures the couple’s young daughter (Berit Holmström). The chasm between the ineffable quality of the Beethoven music – what the orchestra’s conductor Sönderby (Victor Sjöström) later calls ‘a joy beyond comprehension’ – and the defined, implacable human tragedy that has occurred supplies a fiercely dramatic opening to this early Bergman.  The foreknowledge of how Stig’s life with Marta will end shadows the whole film, which proceeds to tell in flashback the story of their time together.

    To Joy prefigures both a particular later Bergman film, Scenes from a Marriage (1973), and a recurring theme of his work – a male protagonist behaving badly and seeming to be unworthy of a devoted woman.  The timeframe of Stig’s and Marta’s relationship, seven years between their first meeting and her death, is much shorter than the one in Scenes from a Marriage (To Joy, at ninety-eight minutes, is little more than half the length of the theatrical release version of the later film).  It’s long enough, even so, for the couple to have two children and for their marriage to founder:  they’ve been reconciled and are starting over only shortly before Marta dies.  They first get together as new members (Marta, née Olsson, the only woman member) of the Hälsingborg symphony orchestra in which both play violin.  Although the tensions in the marriage derive from Stig’s strong, thwarted ambition to become a soloist, his egotism and insecurity lead him into more aggressively destructive actions:  he commits adultery with the unhappily married Nelly Bro (Margit Carlqvist); in one shocking sequence, he hits Marta repeatedly and gives her a bloody nose.

    Bergman’s script is rich in convincing detail, some of it startling.  As Marta packs for her trip to their country cottage with the children, Stig is puzzled by a large box and asks, ‘You got a bomb in there?’  Marta explains that the box contains a new paraffin stove.  Other, relatively inconsequential details give the couple’s relationship an individual reality and humour.   Marta tells Stig, as he stands on the station platform waiting for the train taking her and the children to the country to depart, that he needs a haircut.  He pooh-poohs the suggestion and reminds her he hates going to the barber – ‘Hair all over the place’.  An episode in which Sönderby describes, in voiceover, a visit to the couple, to whom he becomes a kind of father figure, is narratively jarring – this is the only point where Sönderby is the storyteller.  But his description of observing the interactions between Marta and Stig through their glances and quiet words, and the changes of mood these can effect, chimes with what the viewer has seen of them together, when things are going well.  The limitation of To Joy is that, in spite of the fine detail, the overall structure feels forced.  An obvious explanation for this – obvious, at least, at this distance in time – is the autobiographical basis of the piece.  Not for the last time, the man behaving badly in a Bergman film is the writer-director’s alter ego.

    In The Ingmar Bergman Archives published by Taschen in 2008, Bergman acknowledged that:

    ‘The film … was to be about a couple of young musicians in the symphony orchestra in Hälsingborg, the disguise almost a formality.  It was about Ellen [Lundström] and me, about the conditions imposed by art, about fidelity and infidelity.’

    Bergman’s five-year marriage to Ellen Lundström, his second wife, ended in 1950, the year in which To Joy appeared in cinemas.  The driven, self-doubting but self-centred interpretative artist on screen represents the driven, self-doubting but self-centred creative artist behind the camera – and, as Bergman implies in the quote above, too blatantly.  The confessional imperative results in a portrait not just of a marriage going wrong but of its going wrong thanks partly to the failure of another marriage, the one between the gloomy temptress Nelly and the actor Mikael Bro (John Ekman) – as if marriage is bound to fail.  The beautiful, dignified Marta is long-suffering in her relationship with Stig; perhaps she knows what she’s in for, with one failed marriage already behind her.  Stig’s shallow, good-looking friend Marcel (Birger Malmsten), a cellist in the orchestra, has love affairs but is unmarried and may be To Joy‘s most untroubled character.  His only rival is the orchestra conductor, evidently married to his job.  The strength of Bergman’s desire for his own marriages to work out better than they had so far done is perhaps what propels Stig’s and Marta’s somewhat unconvincing reconciliation – though this is also required to give full impact to the eventual tragedy.

    The scene in which Sönderby visits Stig and Marta at their cottage anticipates Bergman’s later, more expansive descriptions of the beauties of Swedish summer (in Summer with Monika, Smiles of a Summer Night and Wild Strawberries, for example).  The contrast between outdoor freedom and behind-closed-doors constraints is simple but eloquently expressed in Gunnar Fischer’s camerawork and lighting.  The film contains moments of marvellous emotional acuity and originality.  When Sönderby arrives at the cottage, the front door is slightly open; he pushes it to see the couple inside, blissfully happy in each other’s company.  Sönderby, so as not to detract from the perfection of what he’s seen, withdraws and knocks on the door, to begin the process of a different moment.   Another telephone interruption to orchestra rehearsal inevitably evokes the one with which the film opens but is transformed by the humorous piece of choreography that follows.  Stig has been called with the news of the birth of his and Marta’s first child.  As he resumes his seat in the orchestra, Sönderby, annoyed, asks the violinist at the front to demand an explanation of Stig’s absence: a pass-it-on message goes down the line to Stig.  His good news returns by the same route to Sönderby, who instantly beams congratulations in Stig’s direction and shifts into an excited, celebratory conducting style.  There’s the odd hackneyed element too, though.  Bergman overuses a toy bear that Stig buys for Marta as a birthday present at the start of their relationship – and Stig Olin mistimes Stig’s noticing the bear in the cottage after Marta’s death:  he reacts before he’s had chance to see it.

    Bergman’s use of classical music, in the orchestra’s rehearsals or performances, is designed, for the most part, to repeat the effect he achieves in the opening apposition of Beethoven’s ninth and the phone call.  In other words, he contrasts the grandeur of the music with the difficulties and shortcomings of the people who make it.  Virtually the only instance of the two things in combination occurs when Stig makes a mess of a violin solo.  This persistent contrast and the implied uplift of the music, which includes Mendelssohn and Mozart as well as Beethoven, pays diminishing returns, though it’s interesting as another expression of Bergman’s compulsions:  the music may have improved his own morale.   The film ends, as it began, with the ninth symphony, as the bereaved Stig returns to play in the orchestra and his little son (Björn Montin) watches from a seat in the front row of an otherwise empty auditorium.  The boy’s inscrutable expression and the fact that his legs are way too short for his feet to touch the ground redeem what might otherwise have been an overly sentimental conclusion.  The cast is strong:  it’s a considerable help that Stig Olin (Lena’s father) has an eccentric spirit that makes Bergman’s portrait of the artist as an egocentric bastard less harsh than it might otherwise be – and enables you to believe that Marta, whom Maj-Britt Nilsson plays with great feeling, might have fallen in love with him.  Victor Sjöström gives Sönderby a blend of irascible gusto and quiet perspicacity that’s greatly engaging.

    2 January 2018

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