Molly’s Game: Satisfying first feature from Aaron Sorkin

AT ONE point, Molly Bloom was running exclusive, multimillion-dollar poker games with celebrities, industry titans and Russian mobsters. Then it all came crashing down.

WEST Wing scribe Aaron Sorkin’s writing has a very specific rhythm. Its cadence has a lyricism when spoken by the right actors — it’s like a symphony that knows exactly which movement should come next.

Sorkin started writing for the screen 26 years ago, and he was a playwright before that. His resumé includes lauded works such as The West Wing, Sports Night, A Few Good Men, The Social Network, Moneyball and The American President.

So getting the casting right on a Sorkin script is instrumental — more so when it’s the writer’s first time in the director’s chair. Jessica Chastain and Idris Elba are the perfect partners for Sorkin to take his first stab at directing, helping him translate that wordsmith talent into a coherent visual language.

He mostly gets there. Molly’s Game is an entertaining and confident debut for Sorkin, even if it’s definitely too long. The discipline of a tighter edit to avoid that 30-minute drag in the final act is something Sorkin should’ve embraced.

Based on the memoir of real-life “Poker Princess” Molly Bloom (Chastain), the film is the story of how a champion skier ended up running the most prestigious poker games in Los Angeles and New York, frequented by movie stars, business titans and mobsters. There were often millions of dollars on the green-felted tables.

Chastain and Elba make good verbal sparring partners.

Sorkin loves facts and the fast-moving pre-credits sequence is a machine gun barrage of stats as Chastain’s voiceover reels off one titbit after another. It’s an impressive rundown of how Molly Bloom’s skiing career veered so dramatically off the path over a statistical near-impossibility.

It sets you up for the intensity Molly’s Game rides on.

Molly ends up working for an over-leveraged arsewipe who runs an underground poker game — the main draw is an A-lister dubbed Player X (Michael Cera) mostly inspired by Tobey Maguire but with lashings of Leonardo DiCaprio and Ben Affleck thrown in, whose continued presence attracts deep-pocketed players who want to rub shoulders with a celebrity. She makes $3000 in tips on that first night.

The movie is structured so that it’s framed by the 2014 felony case brought against her by an overzealous FBI hoping to squeeze Molly and have her “turn” on the Russian mobsters who played at her table.

Her journey to that moment is told through flashbacks to her lawyer Charlie Jaffey (Elba).

Better brush up on your Texas hold ’em.

Sorkin approaches his directing like he does with his writing, with an indulgent attention to details — explaining the minutiae of the poker games, for example, though it’s so quickly edited you may still find it difficult to follow if you haven’t played yourself.

Molly’s Game is also guilty of Sorkin’s affinity for sentimentalism and fairly neat, uplifting endings, which means the resolution to her complex relationship with her demanding father (Kevin Costner) doesn’t quite ring true.

Elba gets the big, signature Sorkin speechifying moment. While he delivers it with triumph, it’s a little frustrating that Molly’s Game ends up partly validating this dynamic woman through the words and judgment of men, rather than any true self-actualisation on her part.

For a first time director, Sorkin has made a satisfying movie, no doubt helped by all the time he spent on set with top-rate directors as one of the industry’s most respected writers. Can’t wait to see what he does next.

Rating: 3/5

Molly’s Game is in cinemas from Thursday, February 1.

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Originally published as Molly’s Game: Satisfying first feature from Aaron Sorkin