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
