A Movie for Adults! Yay!

Rating: 6/10 (11 January 2018)

Molly's Game is essentially a Lifetime Channel movie. It's a true story about a woman overcoming adversity and gender disparity, often being abused, constantly having to pick herself up by her boot straps, yet somehow finding inspiration in her life. Normally this would be a dismissive pejorative, but because of Sorkin's trademark fast, fun and smart (albeit often contrived) writing, it stays consistently engaging, even if it's larger points and tonal shifts are more than a bit problematic.
It's the story of Olympic-skier-turned-underground-poker-ring-runner Molly Bloom, whose life was a seemingly endless run of persistent hard work, shrewd success, and overwhelming failure. In its parts, the film is kind of immaculate. The dialogue snaps and overlaps with daring preciseness. The poker and skiing scenes are tense and thrilling, and do a great job of keeping even the most novice of fans engaged. The performances are very good, including solid turns by both Costner as her hard-nosed dad and O'Dowd as a drunken idiosyncrasy. And Chastain is, of course, wonderful.
With such solid components, a cool script and a wild true story, it's a shame there isn't a more confident, experienced director to manage it all. This is legendary screenwriter Sorkin's debut, and while he has the tendencies of someone like Steven Soderbergh (Ocean's films, Traffic), he doesn't have the control. Characters are miscast (Elba), the score is inspirationally cliched, continuity errors abound; none of that is egregious, but it renders the final product a bit messy. Worse though, Molly's arc and nobler motivations, while likable, are barely cogent. Nonetheless, if you're looking for engaging and high-minded entertainment for adults, you could do much worse.