BEFORE: I'm back on high-stakes poker tonight, I'll get back to World War II later on this summer. Jessica Chastain carries over from "The Zookeeper's Wife"
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Lucky You" (Movie #3,237)
THE PLOT: The true story of Molly Bloom, an Olympic-class skier who ran the world's most exclusive poker game and became an FBI target.
AFTER: Since it's Father's Day weekend, let's review what I've seen so far this year about fathers, and also mothers. Notable fathers, good and bad, include the lead characters in "Suburbicon", "The Beaver", "Goodbye Christopher Robin", "Last Flag Flying", "Wakefield", "The Week Of", "The Hero", "Nights in Rodanthe", "What Happened to Monday", "Christopher Robin", "The Place Beyond the Pines", "A Wrinkle in Time", "White Boy Rick", "Captain Fantastic", "Hanna", and "Billy Elliot".
For notable films about mothers, there's "Mother!" (though that was really about Mother Earth/Nature), "The Light Between Oceans", "The Meddler", "Peace, Love & Misunderstanding", "Vox Lux", "Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again", "The Most Hated Woman in America", "Tully", "Notes on a Scandal", "The Gift", "Crazy Rich Asians", "20th Century Women", "The Grifters". I'm probably missing a lot here, such as films like "A Quiet Place" with a focus on both parents, but you get my drift. Fathers and mothers are all over the countdown, and I could have worked with any of the above if they happened to land on these parental holidays.
But I can certainly use "Molly's Game" as a tie-in. When we first see Molly Bloom, she's skiing in the Olympics, or perhaps trying to qualify for the Olympics, it's hard to be sure. But her father is right there during the competition, and the film later qualifies his appearance there with a riddle - How many female Olympic athletes have demanding fathers? All of them. I can't say for sure if that's true, but it feels kind of true. Is this something that drives successful strong athletic women, trying to please Daddy, or is this an over-simplification? Discuss. Molly's father is also a college professor and practicing therapist (or is he a psych professor? This is also a bit unclear.) But the flashback scenes with a teen Molly talking back to her father are quite insightful, because the implication is that she grew up wanting to control powerful men. But this doesn't really track, because running an illegal poker game doesn't seem like a direct route to controlling men - or is this just a way to try and explain or justify her actions after the fact?
What's clear is that she was driven to be an over-achiever in some fashion. But the film raises this question, about why she did some illegal things if she could have been successful at anything she attempted - and then it never really gets around to answering it. Yeah, the money of course, any illegal operation is liable to be quite profitable, but that's not a complete answer - why put herself at risk if she didn't absolutely have to. Why not quit the poker scene after she raised enough money to attend law school? After her L.A. game got shut down, why start up another, higher-stakes game in New York? Was it the money? Power? Drugs? Maybe there's no single, simple answer.
Maybe I shouldn't expect one from a film written and directed by Aaron Sorkin - nothing on "The West Wing" was ever really cut and dry, that show tackled a lot of complicated issues and dissenting opinions, in addition to its overlapping dialogue and conversations that took place while walking through White House hallways. But speaking of flashbacks, there's an excessive amount of them here, as the film kicks off with Molly's arrest by the FBI, and then she has to over-explain her whole story to her potential lawyer. Yeah, I get it, it's tempting to start the film with the most exciting bit to make a splash, but then snapping back for all the details that should have gone before then can get quite tedious. We're waiting, waiting to catch up with the present so we can find out (eventually) how her court case is going to go.
Once again, I'm fascinated by the mechanics of poker playing and poker betting. Knowing which hands beat other hands is the easy part, but that also gets over-mansplained here. There's a little bit about how people bet when they've got good hands in the initial deal, and how they bet differently when they're bluffing, but not nearly enough. And then I completely didn't understand how someone running a poker game with a high buy-in would extend so much credit to some of the players. If someone comes to the game with $50,000, let's say, then if they LOSE that $50,000, they're done for the night. Isn't that simple? The house shouldn't extend credit to someone on a losing streak, because chances are they're not going to be able to collect from that person - so that sort of didn't add up here. Why keep throwing good money after bad?
Molly started getting her dealers to take a percentage of large pots for the house, but I don't see why this was necessary in the first place - it wouldn't have been if she just didn't extend the players so much credit. It would have made more sense to take a percentage of the buy-in, but what do I know? But hey, if you're running an illegal gambling operation, even if you set up a corporation to do so, what could possibly go wrong? Oh yeah, that's right, how about everything? Getting players from the famous Brooklyn game to come to her game in Manhattan unknowingly puts her in touch with members of the Russian mafia, and that also puts her on the radar of the FBI. Not to mention that the Italian mafia wants to work protection for her games, and they're also very hard to say no to.
But hey, good news, her trial on RICO charges brings her father back into her life, and they can work out all the outstanding psychological Elektra complex stuff, so that's something, right? And we can finally learn why he loved his sons more than his daughter, or at least appeared to. Maybe they just got honest jobs and didn't run illegal high-stakes poker games? Just a thought.
NITPICK POINT: The poker games in both L.A. and New York are shown taking place in hotel rooms, and feature bars with top-shelf liquor and fancy cigars in humidors. But when was the last time that you could legally smoke in a hotel room? Like 99% of hotel rooms have been smoke-free for years, and the fines for smoking in a non-smoking room could have been enough to torpedo her whole operation. Am I right?
Also starring Idris Elba (last seen in "Avengers: Infinity War"), Kevin Costner (last seen in "Rumor Has It..."), Michael Cera (last heard in "The Lego Batman Movie"), Jeremy Strong (last seen in "Time Out of Mind"), Chris O'Dowd (last heard in "Mary Poppins Returns"), J.C. MacKenzie (last seen in "The Wolf of Wall Street"), Brian D'Arcy James (last seen in "Rebel in the Rye"), Bill Camp (last seen in "Vice"), Justin Kirk (ditto) Graham Greene (last seen in "The Shack"), Angela Gots, Natalie Krill, Madison McKinley (last seen in "The Other Woman"), Stephanie Herfield, Joe Keery, Claire Rankin, Victor Serfaty, Michael Kostroff, Jon Bass (last seen in "Loving"), Whitney Peak, Samantha Isler (last seen in "Captain Fantastic"), Piper Howell, Khaled Klein, Matthew Matteo, a cameo from Aaron Sorkin, and archive footage of George W. Bush (last seen in "Quincy"), John Kerry (last seen in "Kill the Messenger"), Dick Gephardt and Jesse Owens,
RATING: 6 out of 10 inadequate bagels
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