Aaron Sorkin’s first film as director gives Jessica Chastain more words per minute than any actress has had in years, and she earns them. The poker is tense, the talk never stops, and a late scene with her father nearly undoes the lot.
Aaron Sorkin has spent his career handing scripts to other directors; this time he keeps one. It is the life of Molly Bloom (Jessica Chastain): a skier whose Olympic hopes end on a frozen twig, who runs a poker game for film stars and finance men in Los Angeles and then New York, before the FBI comes to the door. Nearly every one of its 141 minutes has someone talking. We enjoyed most of it, we were tired by the end, and one scene near the close nearly made us cross. It is a good evening, if you can take the pace.
The talking is the point, and Chastain is why it works. Molly narrates almost without pause, and Sorkin gives her the clause-stacked speeches that used to belong to his senators. Chastain takes them at a sprint and never seems out of breath. She plays Molly as someone who learned early that the quickest brain at the table gets to run it, and who is quietly amused at how readily the men hand it over. The first forty minutes, in which Molly becomes assistant to Dean Keith (Jeremy Strong) and discovers the real job is laying out the chips for his game, are as sharp as anything Sorkin has written.
Charlotte Bruus Christensen shoots the game in low gold light, the faces lit by the lamps over the table, so a fortune can vanish in a room that looks like an expensive den. The lawyer’s office is cooler and flatter, glass and daylight and grey carpet. David Wasco builds the first game in the back room of a bar and the later ones in hotel suites that grow as the stakes do; Susan Lyall’s dresses get lower and tighter in the same proportion. Daniel Pemberton’s score is drums and plucked bass under the narration, pushing the words along. Three editors, Josh Schaeffer, Elliot Graham and Alan Baumgarten, cut the poker with inserts of cards and odds on screen, so that we followed a game we do not play.
Idris Elba is Charlie Jaffey, Molly’s lawyer, and his scenes with Chastain are the only ones in which Molly has to listen rather than explain. Sorkin writes their rows as proper rows, each of them right about something. Michael Cera plays Player X, a star who likes winning less than watching other people lose, and his blank pleasantness has rarely been put to better use. Bill Camp, as Harlan Eustice, a careful player who has one bad night, gives the film its best twenty minutes. We watched a decent man take himself apart hand by hand, and it was hard to look at and impossible to stop, because Camp plays every bad call as a decision he knows is wrong while he makes it.
The trouble is that Molly never stops explaining, and after an hour we wanted her to. The narration tells us what a scene means before it has started, and the actors are left illustrating. Sorkin also cannot resist having other people tell Molly who she is. Late on, Kevin Costner, as her father Larry, turns up for a conversation we will not describe except to say that it explains her whole life in about three minutes and asks us to take that as a resolution. Costner plays it well. We did not believe a word of it, and we were annoyed that a film this clever thought we would.
Sorkin’s best scripts were directed by people who knew when to cut him off. The Social Network (2010) is tight because David Fincher made it so. Directing himself, Sorkin keeps everything, and the film is a quarter of an hour longer than it needs to be. As a first film it is clean and confident, with no visual idea of its own that the words did not get to first.
It carries a 15. Watch it with someone who enjoys being talked at by clever people. If you have come for a story about a woman who beat the men at their own table, you will find a fine performance in a film that keeps letting men speak for her.
