Wednesday, March 20, 2019

Movie review - "Molly's Game" (2018) ****

Aaron Sorkin's directorial debut has plenty of bells and whistles - great dialogue, solid structure. It flew along for me - for the most part, I admit... I think the basic story isn't that interesting. Molly ran a poker game and... met some celebrities and... had some morals and... got busted and... wouldn't give up the names of her clients. Only she did give up some. Then she.... went about her life.

It's entertaining though and fascinating to see how Sorkin relates to Molly, who is a smurfette but is also beautiful, smart, sexy, captivating, briefly drug addicted but gets over it, idealistic... it's like he's making a film for his perfect woman and Jessica Chastain is shot like a goddess. She looks gorgeous.

Mind you she's got a lot of voice over and I don't think her voice is that great - she's no, say, Emma Stone.

Sorkin clearly invests in the father daughter stuff (the scenes with Kevin Costner are among the strongest) and the male-female mentor stuff (Idris Elba) and also men having crushes on beautiful women.

I don't really feel this was a film that had to be made but it's clearly a story with a female protagonist that Sorkin felt he could do, and he did do it, and the world is richer for its presence.

No comments: