Further Notes On Molly’s Game

J

Excellent critique.  But I beg to differ. Molly’s fast pace speech is so entertaining   that it masks the film’s length and her depth does in fact shine when she chooses to risk a prison term rather than get back her $5 M as part of a deal to give up her “hard drive” because defending her“name”, her reputation, her integrity  was sacrosanct.

Me:

I got it about her big personal sacrifice. I did wonder if it’s true or was gussied up Hollywood style. That level of saintliness and sacrifice,—foregoing $5,000,000, really?—in someone like her is hard to believe. Not to say it couldn’t be true but I do wonder. As to the rapidity letting the 2 hours plus sail by, there’s something to that but otoh I’ve seen movies that length and longer that don’t need verbal pyrotechnics to keep me riveted. Take The Godfathers 1 and 2 for instances. But by all means let’s differ. It makes life worth living.

J:

This obsession with keeping one’s “name” echoes in the voice of Theseus in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream who said: “A poet gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.”

Me:

I get that too. At the level of pure fictional cinema, I don’t know if I was convinced by that scene. It worked, I’d finally judge. But I’m dying to know if in her life that’s really the unadorned sacrifice she made. If it were me, I’d be sitting on the 5,000,000 subject to tax liens. The movie put a halo on her but she was fairly scuzzy in real life, a degenerate among degenerates, an addict, a raker, appealing to among our most base instincts, which come out as more tolerable or even to some admirable because of all the glitz surrounding them bought by obscene amounts of money. The apotheosis of it all was Player X, in real life Tobey Maguire, saying he didn’t like poker that much: rather he loved destroying other players. And he financed conflicts of interest. As I say, degenerate.

J:

Ah, yes but as a work of art it was that moment of inspiration that took us to imagine what could be.

Me:

But do you know what the real life deal actually was? I looked a little online but couldn’t find it. On the art thing opening up to the imagination high possibilities, sure, but here the art is based on a true story. It is in that in the nature of a doc. So had she, for the sake of argument, not actually displayed such integrity and sacrifice in real life in agreeing simply to plead guilty as the film has it, I’d argue it would mark a defect in the film, since, again, it doesn’t purport to be fiction.