MOLLY’S GAME
“Did you know that we know what the centre of our galaxy smells like?” asks Jessica Chastain, as random conversational spur, in Molly’s Game. This is how people talk in Aaron Sorkin screenplays: information spat out, banter bouncing back and forth, two different ideas playing at two different rhythms, a polyphony of words. His heroes are usually the-smartest-person-in-the-room, and, at times, you get the feeling that Sorkin’s showoffy dialogue is out to remind you that he is, too.
“Most interpersonal communication is hair-splitting recontextualisation, trying to shift someone else off their position,” David Fincher once said, of Sorkin’s writing; the way he sets two characters speaking at each other, at the same time, waging a kind of war. Fincher was talking, of course, about their collaboration on The Social Network, that motion-picture in which screenwritten Sorkinism truly took flight. During Sorkin’s directorial debut —made after years of screenwriting success, on both big screen and small— there’s recurring reminders of The Social Network. Here, again, Sorkin is fashioning recent history in his own manner, playing fast-and-loose with notions of truth, taking a juicy story of money and celebrity and ego and finding the heart in it. It’s also there in the way the film bounces between present and past, with stories told and re-told, and drama playing out in deposition hearings and legal offices.
The courtroom drama was where the 56-year-old made his name, penning A Few Good Man first as stageplay, then screenplay; a quarter-century on, its dialogue is still quoted, made meme. Over the years, Sorkin’s Sorkinisms have only amplified: Molly’s Game begins with a barrage of words and backstory, Chastain’s wry, knowing, 4th-wall-nudging narration delivering fact and history and jokes at a rapid clip, whilst an opening sting makes micro-cut montage out of stock footage, illustrative imagery, and things scribbled on screen. After dumping an avalanche of information in mere minutes, it ends with Chastain delivering a hearty “fuck you”, in narration; setting up a film in which the verbal volleys will ricochet at a rapid-pace, and our smartest-gal-in-the-room anti-heroine will remain defiant, and charismatic, to the last.
The story he’s telling is of Molly Bloom, who, in real-life Los Angeles in the ’00s, ran a high-stakes poker-game that was the province of the wealthy and famous (Tobey Maguire, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Ben Affleck all played; but none of them appear, at least not exactly, as characters herein). Poker, Chastain says, was her “Trojan horse”, a vehicle wheeled behind forbidden lines, getting her amongst men of power. Later on, her dad, Kevin Costner, diagnoses this as a way of having power over powerful men; the source of this being, of course, her own daddy issues.
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Far-and-away the least interesting moments of Molly’s Game are the ones that go all-in on poker: spouting its insider lingo, playing its hands for drama, building to those moments in which cards are revealed and one lucky winner drags a pile of chips towards him. The only thing duller than poker as drama is poker as metaphor; gladly, the moments in which poker is analogy for some greater wisdom are few, and light. In depicting this insider realm —brand-whoring and Playboy Bunny-ing up “the world’s most exclusive, glamorous, decadent man-cave”— Sorkin essentially fashions it all as intoxicating and addictive, as veritable orgy of addictions.
In contrast to this narrative ‘past’, its present finds Chastain and her lawyer, Idris Elba, discussing, with much contention, the particulars of her case. The pair are on the same side, but forever battling wills and wits; Sorkin suggests a sparkle of sexual tension, but never gives into the ’shipping and he paints a strangely-sexless picture. Chastain vs Elba is pure Sorkinism: threads dancing through conversation, words bouncing back-and-forth in a blur, the digital skyline behind them so stagey it makes these scenes feel like a stageplay.
There’s a sense of impish fun when they breathlessly banter re: selling the film rights to Chastain’s tell-all memoir; and, recurring references to The Crucible silently evoke a key theme (her arrest and trial = witch-hunt).
This is all plenty enjoyable; which is to say nothing of Michael Cera playing villainous celebrity-actor, or Joe Keery (Steve Harrington!) as trust-fund-kid-as-poker-rube, or how Chris O’Dowd plays a drunken slow-talker, who gets comically off-set against Chastain’s super-fast-talker, their conversational speeds as different as ADSL and dial-up.
Sorkin’s glibness suits the story, and, for all its verbiage, the film also functions as character-study of is central figure. The direction is rarely interesting: the busy-ness of the script matched to a busy-ness in editing; there nothing, here, like the contrast between words and visuals that came when Sorkin was matched to Fincher or Danny Boyle (on Steve Jobs). Making his directorial debut, Sorkin simply evinces what we’ve known about him all along: he’s not a man of vision, but of words. Many, many words.
SWEET COUNTRY
Sweet Country opens with an overhead shot of a pot on a fire, at a rolling boil, threatening to boil over. Right near its end, Sam Neill laments “What chance has this country got?” aloud. Between those bookends, throughout the film, Warwick Thornton’s revisionist Western employs symbols that land somewhere between forceful and heavy-handed, and dialogue that feels, at best, instructive, and at worst never quite rings true.
It’s set in 1929 in the Northern Territory, but the lines —and curses— spoken by Ewen Leslie and Thomas M. Wright sound particularly contemporary. Given it’s a revisionist Western, there’s a certain kind of effect —beyond anachronistic misjudgement— in this; as if a pair of modern-day bogans have been dropped on the colonialist frontier, ready to receive comeuppance for their white male/Australia privilege. Leslie is a drunk and a rapist, so, when he gets shot by Hamilton Morris in an act of self-defence, there’s no doubt on whose side audience sympathies will lay. But in the outback of yore, a blackfella shooting a white property-owner is seen as the most horrifying of crimes, and a posse —led by Bryan Brown’s Eastwoodian local sergeant— sets out on Morris's trail.
When Sweet Country enters into the wilderness, the film is at its best. Thornton’s debut feature, 2009’s Samson & Delilah, showed a director who could command a sense of ‘pure cinema’, communicate with images, telling stories big on silence. Sweet Country is his first narrative feature since, and when Thornton photographs tiny figures lost in vast landscapes —environments often hostile— he fashions something evocative, elemental; Morris and Brown eventually twin figures walking amidst the blinding whiteness of a salt-flat.
The second act is staged almost entirely in this fashion, Thornton taking his heavy symbolism to grand ends. But, then, the third act takes a detour into another genre entirely: the courtroom drama. Screenwriters David Tranter and Steven McGregor offer a distinctive riff on this cloistered genre by, simply, setting its proceedings outdoors; the local settlement, built around a pub and a jail, having no appropriate place to house court proceedings. Staged in the streets, it becomes a manifestation of the community itself, which plays into the symbolism at the centre of all courtroom dramas. Here, again, society itself on trial, history in the balance.
These moments make you wonder if the initial screenplay was penned as something more conventional, with Thornton the one pushing it closer to art movie. The results are uneven, the weightiness often leaden; but, in its best moments, Sweet Country uses glorious imagery to live up to its title, blurring the lines between irony and the sublime.
