Well played

In an industry notorious for marginalizing writers, Aaron Sorkin has achieved a lot. Maybe the ultimate. He has made himself a brand.

Whatever you think of Sorkin's work (if you read movie reviews, you probably feel compelled to think something of Sorkin's work) you must admit it has got its own flavor. For some of us, "Sorkinesques" evokes the hyper-verbal, ostentatiously quick and clever dialogue that marks Moneyball, The Social Network and The West Wing. For others it might conjure images of fretting, strutting, white man-splaining protagonists who live by their own code -- like Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) of HBO's The Newsroom (a show with which I had an unhealthy love/hate relationship).

Sorkin is a quick study and a talented but facile writer whose ambition often outruns his reach. Which is precisely what you want in a creator of pop entertainments. Sorkin aims high and sometimes misses, but it's always exciting to watch his exertions. He reminds me of Bill Clinton in that his vaunted intelligence is partly a parlor trick designed to dazzle and impress, and a little of Frank Capra in that there's a darkness at the bottom of his old-fashioned moralizing. Sorkin mightn't be complex, but he is complicated. He mightn't be deep, but he is interesting.

And Molly's Game, his first attempt at directing, is a quality entertainment, driven primarily but not exclusively by another high-octane, brainy performance by Jessica Chastain (with backup from Idris Elba). While Sorkin is smart enough to let the professionals do their thing, he also means to take the opportunity to show that he can really direct, or at least cram a lot of shots into a brief window of screen time.

Which works, especially in the poker sequences and in the kinetic set-piece that opens the film, in which motor-mouthed Molly Bloom (Chastain) -- not to be confused with James Joyce's Ulysses soliloquist -- fills us in on how her plans to become an Olympic skier were derailed and how she postponed law school to go to Los Angeles ("I wanted to be young for a while in warm weather," she tells us in voice-over) where, while slumming as a cocktail waitress, she caught the eye of a hustler named Dean (Jeremy Strong), who hires her to help run a high-end poker game in which the first buy-in is $10,000. When none-too-bright Dean, resentful of the tips Molly's making, pushes back, she essentially hijacks his game, improvising her way into becoming a poker entrepreneur.

Molly, as you may know, is a real person who had her turn in the zeitgeist a few years back when, after being busted by the FBI for running games in New York and L.A., she wrote Molly's Game: From Hollywood's Elite to Wall Street's Billionaire Boys Club, My High-Stakes Adventure in the World of Underground Poker that named some of her rich and famous clients (Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck and Tobey Maguire -- none of whom play themselves in the film -- among them).

She's a typical Sorkin hero, with a highly developed ethical sense to go with her superior intellectual gifts. She's also a little boring, or at least she would be if she wasn't being inhabited by Chastain, who breathes warm life even into Sorkin's most overwritten monologues. (Sorkin has admitted to being rather precious about his words, insisting that actors meticulously stick to his scripts. Presumably Chastain does, which makes her performance even more impressive.)

Midway through the film Elba enters in the form of Molly's lawyer Charlie Jaffey, which allows Sorkin a chance to indulge his taste for walk-and-talk dialogues, and offers something of a release from the snap-cut poker flashbacks (which feature a couple of mini-operas involving a heartbreaking Bill Camp as a good player broken by the luck of a know-nothing donkey and a superb Michael Cera as the creepy Player X who comes to embody Hollywood entitlement (and who's rumored to be based on one of the stars named in Molly's book).

Alan Baumgarten, Elliot Graham and Josh Schaeffer are credited with editing the poker scenes (David Rosenbloom was replaced during post-production) which are crisp and energized, and -- unlike the rest of the film -- obviously improvised.

Still, despite the heightened staginess that inevitably attaches to Sorkin's work (and, to be fair, Shakespeare's too), Molly's Game is an enjoyable experience, a glimpse into a glamorous, shady subculture. Chastain is an excellent tour guide, and Sorkin has surrounded her with an excellent cast (including Kevin Costner as Molly's hard-charging father) and engaged the services of top-of-the-line technicians.

It's not a great movie, and those adverse to Sorkin's style are likely to find little here to change their minds. For all the flashy visuals, this is a wordy story with lots of details on which to nerd out. The feint toward feminism feels half-hearted in that it's difficult to imagine super-powered Molly ever being a true victim.

On the other hand, were it the product of an unknown quantity, Molly's Game would likely be heralded as a highly promising debut, a fresh recycling of the dry screwball comedies of the 1940s, grown-up movies like The Lady Eve and His Girl Friday that featured sparkling dialogue delivered at breakneck speed. Chastain has a bit of Barbara Stanwyck in her, a bit of Rosalind Russell.

Actors like her are a writer's -- and a director's -- best friends.

MovieStyle on 01/05/2018