Molly's Game [2017]

MPAA (R)  CNS/USCCB ()  RogerEbert.com (3 Stars)  AVClub (B)  Fr. Dennis (3 1/2 Stars)

IMDb listing
CNS/USCCB () review
Los Angeles Times (J. Chang) review
RogerEbert.com (C. Lemire) review
AVClub (M. D'Angelo) review


Molly's Game [2017] (directed and screen play by Aaron Sorkin based on the memoir [GR] [WCat] [Amzn] by Molly Bloom [wikip] [GR] [IMDb]) spins a certainly gripping if also somewhat "spoiled sport" sort of a tale of Molly Bloom [wikip] (played in the film by Jessica Chastain), a young adult, who grew up in Loveland, CO (on the Continental Divide, about 1 hour West of Denver), the daughter of a Colorado based psychologist (played in the film by Kevin Kostner) hence ever upper middle class, and whose life's direction took a radical turn as a result of a truly freak accident at the U.S. (freestyle) ski team trials for the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympic Games.  If not for a random pine branch shaving unsnapping the buckling of one of her boots to her skis on her second of three mogul runs, she probably would have made the Team, perhaps even won a Medal at the Games and would have then followed a quite different path than the one that she ended up taking.

Instead, in the aftermath of the (life's fortunes-changing) Accident, she "took a year off" between college (Colorado State) and law school (undetermined, but she had an LSAT score that could have gotten her into Harvard ...) and moved down to Los Angeles where she crashed (found a place) with some friends.

Young and quite attractive (in a town full of young and above-the-par attractive people) and certainly a product of her skiing days, _never a couch potato_, she scored a job as a cocktail waitress at a quite frequented club on the Sunset Strip.  There she got noticed by a patron of said club _for her smarts_ who hired her, nominally, to work as his administrative assistant at his quite random (front?) business by day, but more importantly as his assistant and de-facto book-keeper (she knew how to write and maintain a spread sheet ;-) at a weekly celebrity high-stakes poker game that he ran in the back of a somewhat seedier club but "down the street" from the one where she worked as a cocttail waitress.

Talkative, attractive and again _smart_, she proved a natural.  And when a couple of years later, her boss tried to cut her out of his business, she had already "learned the game," and made enough friends to WAVE HIM GOODBYE as she STEPPED-UP THE GAME moving it TO A SUITE IN A BEVERLY HILLS HOTEL, serving better food with better music, and appropriately enticing (but again _never stupid_ ... why waste your position for a one night stand, or worse, prostituting yourself when you can make easily as much, night after night, simply on tips for your smile/encouragement) serving help (from among her friends at the club where she had worked) and HONESTLY, MADE THIS GAME WORK for a LONG, LONG TIME.

Well, Vice (a nicer way to say Evil...) has a way of eventually catching-up to anyone, no matter how smart one is.  And so she eventually had to leave L.A. because of _one mistake_, but soon re-established herself in New York where for a while she ran an even BIGGER / BETTER / MORE EXCLUSIVE POKER GAME (now complete with smiling but as ever unreachable Playboy Models as her serving help) THAN IN L.A.

To borrow some, (freestyle) skiing terminology, she had "a good run."  Eventually, however, one could say _inevitably_ "the Game" came to attract, well ... the kind of folks, that "a game" like this, again, inevitably attracts.  Still, even if Molly had spent a good part of her twenties "dancing with" / "playing tag" with the Devil, she wasn't necessarily that.  Instead, she was just very, very smart, quite ambitious, and as a former freestyle (moguls) skier TRAINED TO TAKE (QUICK / CALCULATED) RISKS.

Eventually the Feds came crashing in (and honestly, she was so lucky ...).  She did manage to get a good Manhattan-based lawyer (played excellently by Idris Elba) to hack her out of her legal troubles and lived to write a book (and have a movie made) about ... her "please don't do this" life.

Still, the story is gripping and relateable to both the young and no longer so young alike (because _all_ of us were "young" at some point as well).  And as a cautionary tale it is not a bad one.

Here was a young person who had a very good life and came _really close_ to really messing it up (and even close to ending up dead ...).  The temptation of glamour, "outsmarting the world" entices / challenges us all ...


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Downsizing [2017]

MPAA (R)  CNS/USCCB (A-III)  RogerEbert.com (1 1/2 Stars)  AVClub (C)  Fr. Dennis (3 1/2 Stars)

IMDb listing
CNS/USCCB (J. Mulderig) review
Los Angeles Times (J. Chang) review
RogerEbert.com (S. O'Malley) review
AVClub (A.A. Dowd) review


Downsizing [2017] (directed and screenplay cowritten by Alexander Payne along with Jim Taylor) is a silly movie based on a goofy premise _played completely straight_ that ultimately helps Viewers (re)-discover the surprising beauty/richness of their seemingly boring day-to-day lives.  Wow?  How could a goofy / silly movie do that?

Well about thirty years ago, another silly movie with a goofy premise, the Tom Hanks / Meg Ryan vehicle Joe vs the Volcano [1990] did a similar thing: There "Joe" (played by Tom Hanks) introduced to Viewers as an almost immobilized / hysterical hypochondriac was finally told by his doctor the news that he had always dreaded -- that in a year's time he was gonna die of a truly awful disease, that was all the more awful because it was utterly symptomless and neither he nor really anybody else had ever heard of it -- a "brain cloud."  Knowing now, for certain, that "he's gonna die" Joe finally felt liberated to spend that last year of his life doing what he'd always wanted to do -- to go sailing around the world (or as much of it as he could before he, well, ... died).  And while he went about doing that, he kept running into the same woman, in different incarnations (all played by Meg Ryan) until ... well ;-).  A stupid movie, with a goofy premise, that turned out to be remarkably profound ;-).

The current movie begins with the announcement of a scientific breakthrough: A group of Norwegian scientists have come up with a way of shrinking people to 5 inches tall.  WT...?  Why?  Well, the Norweigian scientists, led by the solemn / appropriately grim and _utterly sincere_ in his solemn grimness Dr. Jorgen Asbjørnsen (played by Rolf Lassgård) and his wife Anne-Helene Asbjørnsen (played by Ingjerd Egeberg) tout this as a _definitive_ solution for the world to climate change and over-population:  Imagine that every person who shrunk him/herself to 5" in size (or about 2.3% of their present weight and volume) would correspondingly use only a tiny fraction of the resources that they currently consume.

This amusing premise is then even more amusingly played _completely straight_ through the rest of the story:

Some years after the solemn Asbjørnsens announced their breakthrough, real estate developers in the U.S. are selling to the struggling middle class the ECONOMIC POSSIBILITIES of "Living Big" by "Going Small."  Middle class families finding it hard to buy homes at all in our dimensions, could come to live in McMansion-style _Doll Houses_ in new gated, indeed, domed, "Leisure Land" communities for well ... a few hundred bucks ;-).

And so it is, that Paul and Audrey Safranek (played by Matt Damon and Kristen Wiig) a random, struggling, and certainly not gonna go particularly anywhere late-30 early-40 something couple from Omaha, NE, decide that "going small" may be for them.  Actually they're largely talked-into-it by couple of old-high school friends (played by Jason Sudeikis and Maribeth Monroe) who made a splash at their last High School reunion by coming there "smalled" (everybody else came to the reunion, basically how they've always been / for years ... so that couple, Dave and Carol Johnson, really _stood out_ ;-)

When their latest mortgage application gets rejected, they head out to the Nevada based "Leisureland Estates" and ... Paul certainly's sold, Audrey ... less so.  She goes along with it, but just at the moment when they are separated to undergo their "smalling procedure" ... she backs out.  As a result, since Paul's now 5" tall and Audrey 5'5" at least ... the two divorce, with Audrey taking most of their assets.

Paul's then _reduced_ to working now in a Leisureland phonebank (on the phone no one can tell that you're only 5" tall ...), and presumably paid smaller-sized wages as well.  So ... gone are dreams of living in a McMansion-style doll house.  He now lives in an apartment... with an annoying / quite noisy / ever partying neighbor above him ;-)

It's now that the the diminished / down-trodden Paul encounters the two most compelling characters in the story.

First there's Dušan Mirković (played brilliantly by Christoff Waltz) that noisy / ever partying upstairs neighbor who's this ever-smiling 'cause he's ever scheming Serbian mobster-like figure, who's figured out all sorts of silly, basically illegal, but arguably harmless (except to one's pride) ways to "make a buck off of this 'smalling scam'" -- among the things he sells are fake small "authentic cuban cigars" to the rich folks of leisureland: "So what, really, if they're made by tiny, smalled, Albanian refugees.  They make a living, and I sell an image.  Everybody wins."  The same he does with wine and perfume, selling them presumably literally "a drop at a time." ;-)

And then there's one of Dušan's cleaning ladies: Ngoc Lan Tran (played inspiringly by Hong Chau) who had made news some years back when, as a jailed Vietnamese Dissident, she was "smalled against her will" and then along with 15 other "undesireables" deported inside a flat-screen television box, and discovered only when she reached the U.S. with the other 15 having already died "during the journey."  Having lost a leg during her ordeal, she nonetheless, ran that cleaning service giving jobs to otherwise other "down on their luck" "small people" and ran all sorts of other charitable efforts for other "small people" in even greater need.  And in a nice bow to the at least potentially transforming power of Christianity, it becomes clear that Ngoc Lan Tran was motivated to do all of this because of her Christian faith.

Well poor always basically invisible Paul, finds himself, despite himself, in the company of these lovely if eccentric characters: "I love you Paul, you're always so boring," says at one point the ever smiling, ever scheming Dušan as he gives him a big bear hug and kissed him on the top of his head.

And surprisingly, by the end of the film one's able to leave with some very interesting questions to ponder:  Does "size" matter?  "Big" or "small," the characters' personalities / capacities remained basically the same.  Does "technological progress" matter?  The same pitches, the same problems continue despite changes in our technological capabilities.  So what does, in the end, _matter_?  The film's actually quite clear in its opinion on that ;-).

A wonderfully initially "stupid" yet thought-provoking film ;-)


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