OVP: Molly's Game (2017)

Film: Molly's Game (2017)
Stars: Jessica Chastain, Idris Elba, Kevin Costner, Michael Cera
Director: Aaron Sorkin
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Adapted Screenplay)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

As a critic, you have to learn a bit to judge on a curve, because most people who finally make it to the big-screen are relatively talented.  Unless you have an exception like a pop star who tries their hand at acting, is no good at it but is too famous not to keep trying (I stand behind my assessment that Justin Timberlake gave the worst performance of any actor this year that I've seen in Wonder Wheel, and I am already girding myself for having to see A Star is Born with the notoriously wooden Lady Gaga), most actors these days are strong enough if they get to headline a major motion picture to at least not embarrass themselves.  There are exceptions every year (Lily Collins in Rules Don't Apply last year comes screaming to mind for some reason, as does John Malkovich in Deepwater Horizon), but by-and-large it's pretty rare for an actor to be giving a heinous performance in a major motion picture if they are a trained professional.

(Spoilers Ahead) But like I said you have to judge on a curve, as there are certainly performers that are consistently more talented than others, and few actors working today are as talented as Jessica Chastain.  I would argue that in terms of combining movie star charisma, chameleon-like acting ability, and just general watchability, Chastain might be the most electric actor currently working in movies.  Like Meryl Streep in the 1980's or Al Pacino in the 1970's, every performance is something to behold.  It might not always be the best performance of the year (she should have, by my estimation, at least three Oscar nominations at this point, however, and probably one trophy), but no one's more consistent.  Which makes Molly's Game a true conundrum as the combination of Chastain's impossibly strong ability as the lead and Sorkin's intense flare for auteurist writing seeping through in the script makes this seem like a good movie.  How could it not be?  It sounds good, the lead performance is compelling-isn't that what makes a movie good?  But beneath the pleasant surface, you quickly find the fault-lines that not even a performer like Chastain can save.

The film focuses on Molly Bloom (Chastain), a former Olympic skiing prospect who, after an injury and a rough relationship with her father, finds herself hosting a high-stakes poker game for her jackass of a boss.  She is aided by a Player X (Cera, who is terrific as he sends up what is clearly Tobey Maguire in this role), a movie star who is so famous that guys will come and want to lose tens of thousands of dollars to him.  The film's first half unfolds well, albeit with us knowing that Molly will fall as we're flashing to the "present" where she's under arrest for connections to the Russian mob.  Watching the different stories that came out of her card table are fascinating, and Chastain well-manages Molly's big city dreams and her shock at how seedy men with unlimited amounts of money can be.  In many ways it's stealing from GoodFellas, but really-at this point what crime movie isn't stealing from GoodFellas, and it does it better than most.

The movie, though, flails under the pressure of too much plot in the second half.  Sorkin is too good of a writer to not keep the grandiose speeches coming (though he also can't miss the "big heart" moments, like the one between Chastain and Costner-as-her-father late in the picture is drowning in corniness), and Chastain seems tailor-made as a performer to deliver his gigantic "I am a walking thesaurus" soliloquies, but the connection to the characters seem lost without a director to tamper down Sorkin's showing off.  Chastain plays Molly as largely a saint with a drug problem, someone who is ridiculously smart but somehow is to be believed that she didn't know the Russian mob was into her game to the degree that it was, and who was more than willing to break the law (repeatedly) with little consequence because other guys in the game were doing much worse.  It's a problem because it's hard to forget that this is real-life, and in real-life it's hard to imagine that Bloom, whip-smart and clearly driven, didn't have some inkling of what was happening in these games and perhaps got off because she was the smallest fish in this pond and wasn't worth the effort when you're talking about violent criminals.  Her morality and code of not naming names never gets across, considering so often she's cutting corners late in the film, and blaming it solely on the drugs feels like a cop-out.  Chastain's biggest weakness is that (perhaps for legal reasons, considering this is based on Bloom's book) she can't land these huge moments because it takes too big of a suspension-of-belief to assume that our intelligent protagonist was so strung out on cocaine and Adderall that she wasn't able to see the obvious criminal implications in front of her but was able to spout off the witty bon mots of a Noel Coward character.  Here Sorkin's brilliance gets in the way of his plot (not an uncommon problem for his works), but it makes the movie ring false, and totally undercuts his big "all I have is my name" speech from Chastain.  As a result, the plot and the climax don't work.  The writing and Chastain are solid, but if they can't land the plot it doesn't matter-Molly's Game is all flare and no soul, and casting the best actress in Hollywood can't buy Sorkin an ending to a movie he doesn't know how to finish.