Review: Jessica Chastain rescues ‘Molly’s Game’

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Jessica Chastain and Aaron Sorkin are on the same page when it comes to their new film 'Molly's Game,' but they don't quite see eye to eye on other games. USA TODAY

The words fly fast and dubious in “Molly’s Game,” the story of top-tier skier Molly Bloom, who turned injury and serious daddy issues into one of the highest-stakes underground poker games in the country.

Luckily, Jessica Chastain is there to deliver the words, along with Idris Elba. If you’re going to listen to a couple of actors do a lot of really fast talking, they’re good choices.

The rapidity and cleverness of the dialogue is hardly a surprise: This is the feature directorial debut of Aaron Sorkin, who perfected the walk-and-talk on television with “Sports Night” and then “The West Wing.” He won an Oscar for writing “The Social Network,” had a hit on Broadway and at the movies with “A Few Good Men” and is generally considered a writer who can get more bang for the buck in terms of words per scene than anyone else out there.

Sorkin is immensely talented, but sometimes he gets carried away with the sound of his own voice. That makes him a good choice to adapt Bloom’s memoir, the story of a gifted woman whose talents get the best of her.

The film’s opening segment, which takes us through Bloom’s early life (she was a whisker away from making the Olympics) is terrific. Her father (a really good Kevin Costner, so much more valuable these days in supporting roles than as the leading man) was punishingly tough on her — something Sorkin establishes in the prologue, which would make a nice little mini-feature all by itself.

Once her Olympic dreams are thwarted, Bloom isn’t sure what to do with her life. She works a couple of jobs, and her jerk boss (Jeremy Strong) at one of them runs an underground poker game that includes some fairly high rollers. One is an actor she calls Player X (Michael Cera), who is probably supposed to be Tobey Maguire, one of the famous people Bloom has claimed played in her games. (Others include Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck and Alex Rodriguez.)

Bloom is about 10 times smarter than her boss, so she figures out, after saving tips and investing in more upscale accommodations, how to take over the game and really up the ante, literally and figuratively. As in, a $250,000 buy-in.

That she’ll be taken down is no surprise. Sorkin has structured the story in such a way that Bloom is arrested and looking for a lawyer early in the film. She finds Charlie Jaffey (Idris Elba), who’s reluctant to take her on as a client and wants her to plead every chance she gets.

There’s not a lot of suspense in what happens in the story, and Sorkin doesn’t build tension during the games very often. But that’s OK. It allows us to focus on terrific character actors like Bill Camp and Chris O’Dowd as they try to stay afloat with the odds stacked against them.

It’s tempting to say that the real star here is Sorkin because he has put dialogue front and center in the film, but it’s Chastain who is the real draw. She never lets the dialogue get ahead of her and manages to make Bloom a real character, not just a quip-a-minute delivery system for Sorkin’s words.

Most of the complexity in “Molly’s Game” comes from its structure as we go back and forth in time with Bloom. It’s a fun movie, but it’s also a little exhausting.

‘Molly’s Game’

Three stars

out of four stars

Rated R; language, drug content, violence

2 hours, 20 minutes

Opens Christmas Day