Review of Molly’s Game, directed by Aaron Sorkin

Lately, I’ve been on such a grind when it comes to watching movies. It helps that when I finished up my master’s degree, I had a gap in-between when I needed to go to South Korea and when I was done with school, and once I returned back from Korea, I was able to have some more time off as I painfully waited for my Indian visa to arrive.

So during this time I caught up on my blog posts, scheduling them way in advance so I could get ahead and not worry about them for a long time, and watched a lot of movies at the same time. If you're interested in book, television, movie, or even theatre reviews, make sure to check out the rest of my blog!

That said, Molly’s Game is one of the movies I watched during this period in which I had nothing to do except my freelance work and the blog. I honestly had not heard of it before I stumbled upon its little thumbnail on Netflix, but once I read the synopsis and saw that Jessica Chastain and Michael Cera were in it, I was sold on its premise.

Anyways, I watched it on one go, as I had nothing much else going on, and had quite a few thoughts!

Let’s get into the review before I start rambling too much.

Former skier Molly Bloom gets caught up in running her own gambling rings—with a major price.

We begin this movie with meeting Molly Bloom in her career as a skier. She’s promising in this athletic world, much to the help and joy of her father that’s a tad too dedicated to what his daughter does. As she gets ready for the Winter Olympics in 2002, she goes for qualifying, but gets an injury that effectively ends her career as a skier.

Molly decides to move to LA after that for some soul searching instead of going to law school. She gets a job as a waitress at a club in order to survive, but when she befriends real estate developer Dean, she becomes his manager and runs his underground poker games.

A lot of big, influential figures attend these games, and Molly realizes that she’s making a ton of money in tips because these people are loaded. Despite originally not knowing how to play poker, she learns to play the table to maximize her own profit, and then she befriends a man named Player X, who is a film star.

With his help, she wants to bring more people into the game. She decides to run her own operation at a hotel, and Player X, along with other frequent players, join her new games. However, Player X wants her to raise the stakes, and Molly realizes he’s also feeding money to another player, who keeps losing, and that he takes pleasure in screwing people over financially and mentally.

She confronts him, and he decides to leave the games. The others join him and Molly decides to move her games to New York City with a fresh pool of players. There, she enlists some of the wealthiest New Yorkers to play her games, as well as Russian mafia members, but then she, along with her dealer, decide to cut down on the losses by taking a percentage of the big pots.

This makes it illegal, but Molly proceeds with it anyways. When Brad is caught, Molly is questioned for her role and who might be coming to her games. She also has become addicted to drugs at this point to cope with the stress of running the operation. Things start to blow up when the Italian mafia asks her to do more illegal extortion, and when she says no, they have her attacked.

One of the players then snitches to the FBI on her games, and her assets are seized in a raid. Molly moves back home with her mother and publishes a book, which includes naming names at who came to her games. She was arrested by the FBI for her work and being involved with the mafia, and now, two years later, and wants to meet with a lawyer to protect herself more.

The lawyer, Charlie, doesn’t take her seriously at first, but when he reads her book he becomes more convinced to take on her case. He works on getting a deal where she doesn’t go to prison in exchange for her information, but she doesn’t want this. She pleads guilty instead, and the judge decides to sentence her to community service, probation, and a massive fine.

Overall Thoughts

I thought this was an interesting movie in how it reflects the reality of a real-life situation. Molly Bloom is a real person, and the characters who attended her gambling dens are based on real people, too. Player X is modeled after some big names in Hollywood, which isn’t shocking in the long run.

To me, this movie was compelling as it showed how one woman, who comes from a modest background (as we see in this film—not sure if it’s reality) being sucked into this illegal world of big money and what comes out of it. That said, there are devastating consequences when you try to be a big fish in it and don’t know how to come off clean.

All of this is to say I enjoyed the film. It’s not high art, but it has its value in other ways. Go watch it if you’re interested—I think you might like it!

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