You have to watch it!
I imagine that, as for many, this is a period of telematic peregrinations, of spasmodic research of leisure or serious investigation that only mother technology can give. And, in this reconnaissance, I come across “Molly’s game” without knowing much about it except that it develops around a true story, or at least plausible, and about the game of poker.
She, Molly Bloom ( masterfully played by Jessica Chastain), tyrannized by her father Larry (Kevin Costner), psychoanalyst and extremely competitive (two particularly hard conditions to endure at the same time), after failing his sports career, due to a serious accident on the ski slopes in view of participation in the Olympics, directs her extremely intelligent and sharp eye to the game of poker: she becomes, first in Los Angeles and then in New York, the organizer of the gaming tables and the most popular evenings in their respective cities, involving some of the most emblematic figures of them.
Singers, actors, directors, businessmen, scoundrels of every ream and mobster of various kinds are involved. As you can imagine the game grows to such an extent that the political/monetary control becomes more and more complicated for Molly: to have sufficient cash coverage (she is the dealer and the bank at the same time) in a game where the buy-in is 250.000 $ she is forced to take a percentage on the plays which, being illegal in the States (not the organization of private gambling tables), progressively leads her to be placed under attention first by the Mafia, which beats her up and then by the FBI, which brings her to trial.
At no point in the film violence is exhibited as a self-sufficient condition; at no point in the film does verbal vulgarity become a substitute for a lack of ideas. The castle of poker cards, at that point, collapses: Molly will be forced to defend herself in court with the help of Charley Jaffey (Idris Elba) and, indirectly, of her daughter, little big Stella (Whitney Peak). She won’t give names or even surnames, except for some already caught, she will plead guilty, but she will land on her feet, with a hefty bill to pay and a few hours of social services, but no clink time.
Narrations, plot, the hideous spoiler and its most nefarious meaning
There is a hideous term, but it is not the first one, which is Italianization of an English one: spoilerare, meaning the art of revealing the plot, the conclusion, the surprise effect of a movie, a book, or other.
If revealing something about a movie or a book or something else would be tantamount to ruining it, then I honestly think that that book or that movie deserves very little: because if a text is only its outcome, and in the end, there is that little a story has failed to make pleasant and intriguing, then the story is nothing but the conclusion of itself and not its principle, development, and enjoyment. So in “Molly’s Game” it would be reductive to think of the father as the initial and final appearance of the film, as the cause and possible solution (the wonderful analysis on the bench) of the torments and intentions of the young poker manager. The father is always present as well as, and not otherwise, his ego and her ego, her competitiveness and competitiveness, her betrayals, and unfinished betrayals. And the same goes for poker, a place of daring exchanges, of unparalleled skill, of ill-concealed intentions, of compromises, of powers and roles that they specify and that they redefine, of infinitesimal choices that change indefinitely, of the interweaving of plans, among which the legal and illegal one is just one of many, of the distances between fraud, investigations, repressions, and spit, which are then what separates the court and Wall Street, the judge from Wall Street and the judgment on Wall Street and its rules and offenses.
The Galaxy smells like raspberries and rum.
Between a look at the chips and an ear strained to the speeches that spread during the games, Molly updates herself, reads and studies different things: in the story, she tells her lawyer about a near degree in Astronomy, from which she would lack a few credits; and she’s asking more or less like this: “But are you aware that the Universe smells of raspberry and rum?”. So I’m going to look for the news: the discovery is the product of the work of a group of astronomers from the Max Planck Institute for Radioastronomy in Bonn, who brought their maxi telescope on a huge mass of dust and stellar gas to intercept the complex molecules capable of giving rise to life. As in any self-respecting serendipity, you start looking for something and you come across something else: Sagittarius B2 dust cloud residues, at the center of our galaxy, contain a substance called ethyl formate, chemically responsible for the scent of raspberry. “And that’s not all: chemistry manuals explain that this substance not only tastes like raspberries but smells like rum. Astronomers used an IRAM radio telescope in Spain (Institut de Radio Astronomie Millimetrique) to analyze the electromagnetic radiation emitted by a particularly dense area of Sagittarius B2, which surrounded a newborn star. From the radiation coming, the German team found the typical emission characteristics of ethyl formate, an organic compound made of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen, which are the same elements that are needed to make amino acids. In the same cloud was also intercepted the presence of propyl cyanide, a lethal substance, and the two molecules are the largest ever found in space so far”.
In the end.
In the end, Molly, her brothers, her father, her lawyer, her daughter (I think) celebrate the sentence at the table, when she, looking into those big, sad eyes, asks herself, made a series of considerations about what awaits her from a professional, financial, personal point of view: “What do I do now?” A question that has not leave me indifferent. And these days more so.
vinoestoria 