Molly's Game (2017) - Chastain is luminous in Sorkin's great true-crime debut

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Star Jessica Chastain in an extreme close-up in B/W and shades looks cool AF on the poster for Aaron Sorkin's Molly's Game

 

Molly Bloom's career as an Olympic skier collapses with an accident, and a few years later she gets arrested by a small army of FBI agents, now as the leader the country's highest stakes illegal poker game.

Molly's Game is written and directed by debuting great New-Yorker filmmaker Aaron Sorkin (A Few Good Men (1992, writer)), adapting the same-titled 2014 memoir by the real-life Molly Bloom.

Jessica Chastain (The Color of Time (2012)) is out of this world in the complex, riveting part as the extremely driven and intelligent Bloom, SPOILER who eventually finds herself in over her head in pursuit of a goal that begins to fade in the horizon. She is radiant here as the tough survivor. Idris Elba (Thor (2011)) is good as the sexy attorney who takes her case despite its legally dubious elements.

Sorkin relates the story with dense dialog and a high pace. Molly's Game is grand in width, comparable to a down-played style-wise recent film in the Martin Scorsese tradition, though with a female protagonist, which Sorkin's great script and Chastain's flawless performance never makes a sensational point in and of itself.

There is fun (Chris O'Dowd! (The Program (2015))), dramatically satisfying moments, - Kevin Costner (Dragonfly (2002)) is good as Bloom's psychologist father, - excellent lighting, editing and more. Molly's Game is a splendid piece of work that is more than it may appear.

Related posts:

Aaron Sorkin: The day after the day after ... the 2018 Oscars

Oscars 2018: Predictions and Film Excess' favorites

Moneyball (2011) - Miller makes compelling baseball movie history (co-writer) 

The Social Network (2010) - Fincher's a-hole biopic leaves me cold (and more anti-Facebook than ever) (writer)

A Few Good Men (1992) or, You Can't Handle the Truth! (writer)

 Watch a trailer for the film here 

 

Cost: 30 mil.$

Box office: 59.2 mil. $

= Big flop (returned 1.97 times its cost)

[Molly's Game premiered 8 September (Toronto International Film Festival) and runs 141 minutes. Bloom approached Sorkin with her book on her own, as he was her favorite writer. Shooting took place in Ontario, including Toronto, and in New York from November 2016 - January 2017. The film opened #19 to a 1.1 mil. $ first weekend in 271 theaters in North America, where it peaked at #7 and in 1,708 theaters (different weeks) and grossed 28.7 mil. $ (48.5 % of the total gross). The 2nd and 3rd biggest markets were the UK with 5.8 mil. $ (9.8 %) and France with 4.3 mil. $ (7.3 %). The film was nominated for the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar, lost to James Ivory for Call Me By Your Name. It was also nominated for 2 Golden Globes, a BAFTA, and several other honors. Sorkin returned with The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020, VOD). Chastain returned in Woman Walks Ahead (2017); Elba in The Mountain Between Us (2017); Costner in The Highwaymen (2019). Molly's Game is certified fresh at 82 % with a 7.10/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]

What do you think of Molly's Game?

Force Majeure/Turist (2014) or, Swedes in Trouble

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The hip, eye-catching poster for Ruben Östlund's Force Majeure

Force Majeure is the astounding Swedish Oscar entry this year, which has taken audiences aback most places it has run. It is the 4th feature written and directed by Ruben Östlund (Play (2011)).

On a 5 day family holiday in the French Alps to ski, a Swedish nuclear family share a traumatizing experience one day in a restaurant on the slopes, as an avalanche nearly buries them alive, and the man of the family acts differently than everyone had expected.

Force Majeure works like a human study, and the four main characters are presented very much like present day human specimens, put forth for our observation. There's an exhibitionist quality to the film, also apparent in the maintenance guy who hangs around the hotel and helps the family out while quietly observing them.
The movie is one of those that have a very distinct look and visual concept: Östlund and cinematographer Fredrik Wenzel (The Quiet Roar (2014)) present the conflicts in some very persuasive images that are never without their own points, besides the ones that the scenes embody.

A poignant still from Ruben Östlund's Force Majeure that illustrates very well the situation that the family in the film come to find themselves in

The details:

The acting in the film is very strong: Johannes Kuhnke (Real Humans (2012-14)) and Lisa Love Kongsli (Fatso (2008)) as the couple, Kristofer Hivju (The Thing (2011)) and Fanni Metelius (The Sexual Monologues (2011), short) as the friendly couple who get involved with their issues, and Brady Corbet (Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011)) in a key scene as an outsider.
The film works also as an exposé and a seething critique of contemporary Swedes, (as its original title, which means 'tourist', also indicates.) - The Swedes of Östlund's generation are, in this film, mostly unsympathetic, egotistical tourists in their own lives; grown up in a society of increasingly feminine values, emotionally over-nursing, fiercely atheistic and stifling. If I hadn't personally felt so detached from them, their influence on their kids may have been more of an emotional ordeal for me.
As it is, the film is an intriguing, very intelligent play of gender roles, relationship politics and modern life, arranged in supreme pictures, sound design and its eerie Vivaldi motif. Darkly humorous, wry, scathing, and serious, it also lays bare the many anxiety-provoking aspects of the skiing holiday very powerfully.
I am nearly ready to declare this meaningful film that works on so many levels a masterpiece. - I wanted it to end at the time, SPOILER when the family head into the white blizzard, father first, which would have been the perfect end for me. Instead, it had some more in store for us, which was also good, but ended up detracting a tiny bit from the whole, I think.

Watch the excellent trailer here

Cost: Unknown
Box office: 1.2 mil. $ (US only)
= Uncertainty
[Without the cost of the film and especially some European box office numbers, I can't say for sure if the film has proven financially successful yet, although I suspect that it has. It received the Jury Prize from the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes 2014, and is still very much in the race for the Best Foreign Film Oscar 2015.]

What do you think of Force Majeure?