A strong women?

Rating: 7/10 (8 February 2018)

Molly Bloom (Jessica Chastain is as wonderful as ever) the heroine of the movie "The Big Game" is a strong woman. She was an Olympic athlete in her teens, she ran a successful gambling business in her twenties, she wrote a book that became a best seller and she bravely stands up to police pressure and refuses to give away details about her clients when she is judged for her actions and rdo not wish to play by the "their" rules. She rents out the services of an expensive lawyer that she can not afford with the assurance and absolute faith that she can repay his duty and after all this she also succeeds in being a roll model for that lawyer's daughter when their relationship reminds her of her own relationship with her competitive father.
But the movie "The Big Game" not only shows us how strong Molly is. In fact it keeps trying to show us how weak Molly is in the world of the men thyat surrounds her. It begins with her father, who ignores her medical condition and drags her to a sporting event from which she almost dies at the beginning of the film. This continues with the players in the game she runs in Los Angeles, celebrities who are addicted to the thrill of the game and eventually prove to her that it is not her game at all, as she was wrong to believe. After that the aggressive poker players she meets in New York when she tries to start over, from royalty to Russian mafiosi. And it ends in the legal system itself, where the men decide between themselves about her fate when Molly is asked to leave the room. Until finally it is not clear why Molly has been arrested in the first place and there is a growing suspicion that Molly is right, and she has been a colorful gimmick to add popularity to one of the largest illegal gambling trials in America. All of these impair Molly Bloom's ability to really be a strong female figure on the screen and influence the viewers. Moreover, her psychologist father even diagnosed Molly with a situation in which she was caught up in her desire to take revenge on men who are as aggressive as her father. Thus, in a very simplistic interpretation, Molly's independent and competitive character is erased, and this is the main weakness of the film, especially when it repeatedly chooses to ignore the intersections in which Molly failes to escape from the game and the events around it.
The film does not even pass the Bechdel test. Other female characters who could become more central like the daughter of the lawyer, Molly's mother, and Molly's employees are lost in the plot and have almost no place, they come in and out of the movie immediately as if they themselves were a beautiful decoration for the set. The only scene in which two women talk about Molly's "work" can not really be considered "passing" because of the insignificant place it has in the film. On the other hand, the film does manage to criticize the male world in which Molly operates. A world where a woman is only a means, a world where big money is running without any second thought, a world made up only of men that only them have the crazy sums to spend on dangerous games. Men who often appear as ridicules and weak at best and manipulative, unscrupulous and murderous at worst. Accordingly, Molly's outward appearance changes when she wants to please these men as she enters the game and earns more money and becomes a successful businesswoman who rolls millions. This external figure is so adamant that she continues to be her outward persona years later when she appears in court and with her lawyer. When the latter comments to her in a patronizing tone that she might wear something else, she replies that she has no other clothes. Imagine that...