"I bet heavy on the favorite."

Rating: 8/10 (22 April 2020)

The thing that fascinates me about the life of Molly Bloom is how virtually inconsequential things in and of themselves can have such a major impact on one's life and career. I'm thinking of the little sprig of pine needles that upended her Olympic trial run for which she was a virtual shoo-in. Then there was the jerk Dean Keith (Jeremy Strong) who hired her, and despite his irritating persona, introduced her to the world of high stakes poker gambling which the feisty woman took as a challenge and ran with. Having hung on long enough to learn the game and the major celebrity players involved, Ms. Bloom (Jessica Chastain) eventually struck out on her own and became an even larger force in the gambling world.
I've seen Jessica Chastain in a couple of other films ("Zero Dark Thirty", "The Zookeeper's Wife"), but never this glamorous or gorgeous. You could understand how the real Molly Brown, who was just as beautiful, would have become a magnet for the high stakes players who showed up at the Cobra Lounge and later, her own digs after the break with Player X (Michael Cera). With a high degree of integrity and personal discipline, Brown built a mini-empire that brought her wealth and made her name a household word in an underground economy.
I'd have to agree with a handful of other reviewers here who comment on the length of the picture, playing out a bit longer than necessary by what felt like some repetitious events in Molly's experience. There's also the poker lingo that blows by so quickly you'll wonder just what the heck the voice over narration was talking about; I watched with captioning and it still left me in the dust. There was a great poignant scene later in the movie in which Molly faces her demanding father (Kevin Costner), the source of her early anger by pressuring a total insistence on perfect performance. Up until then, Costner was a minor figure in the story, but in that one scene he took a miniscule role and made it profound.