Aaron Sorkin’s directorial debut Molly’s Game answers a question that had, perhaps, never been asked before: What would happen if a movie were composed almost entirely of montages?
Starring Jessica Chastain, Molly’s Game is the true story of Molly Bloom, an Olympic-class skier that went on to run one of the world’s most exclusive high-stakes poker games only to be arrested by the FBI seven years later.
Molly’s poker games drew in Hollywood celebrities, sports heroes, trust fund giants, and even members of the Russian mob. Her story is one that spans several complicated and chaotic years, full of compelling details that add up to one hell of a story – a story that Sorkin ends up telling almost entirely through wildly entertaining, precisely edited montages serviced by more voiceover than you can imagine.
Well, maybe you can imagine it. If you’re familiar with Sorkin’s other work – The West Wing, The Social Network, Moneyball, and The Newsroom, to name a few – you won’t be surprised at how well written, or perhaps overwritten, Molly’s Game is.
It’s clear that Sorkin didn’t want to leave out a single detail of this incredible, almost unbelievable story. However, in order to capture that entire story, Sorkin writes and writes and writes. Hardly any of that writing is actual dialogue shared between characters; instead, it’s all voiceover set on top of a montage.
Fans of The Social Network, a script that won Sorkin an Oscar, will no doubt remember a particular montage at the beginning of the film where Mark Zuckerberg, after a break-up, gets drunk and starts blogging while writing the code for his site “FaceMash.” It is an incredible montage and Molly’s Game makes the case that Sorkin never forgot about it. He loved it so much he decided to turn it into a movie.
Scenes of smoky rooms filled with high-profile celebrities, crowded bars with cocktail waitresses recruiting players, high-stakes drug and alcohol fueled poker games, cash exchanges in the millions, luxurious hotel suites make up the decadent tapestry of montages against which Molly Bloom’s story is told.
Of course, Molly’s Game is hardly the first movie that utilizes montages to convey a massive amount of information to the audience. The history of the montage stretches almost as far back as the medium itself.
Most historic texts name Russian director Sergei Eisenstein as one of the pioneers in the use of the montage. Hollywood popularized the use of the montage beginning in the 1930s – using newspapers and trains as primary subjects for these montages, in order to denote passage of time and space or to convey new information.
In the decades since its inception, the movie montage has taken countless forms, including makeover sessions like Pretty Woman and Clueless, athletic training in Rocky and The Karate Kid, travel montages as seen in Casablanca and It Happened One Night, or emotional tearjerkers like Up and Magnolia.
Regardless of their sub-categorization, all movie montages exist to communicate with the audience and assist in telling the story. When used well, montages provide an exciting variation in a story’s rhythm, broadening the visual style of the film while moving the plot forward.
Some of the best movie montages, like those found in Citizen Kane, The Godfather, Legally Blonde, and Marie Antoinette use the movie montage in a way that doesn’t just service the story, but elevates it by capturing something exceptionally unique and memorable. These montages don’t simply give the audience plot, but they help deepen the emotional arc and aesthetic value of the film itself.
The montages in Molly’s Game function to communicate significant plot details while also giving the film an exciting and effervescent energy that sustains the movie’s two hour and twenty minute runtime. This is particularly impressive given how dense some of the details of Molly’s story really are.
The structure of the film, which follows Molly in the days leading up to her trial, functions mostly through flashbacks back to the events that led to her arrest. Sorkin’s decision to turn almost all of those flashbacks into lengthy montages is a choice that reflects either a disinterest in or inability to tell this story in a way that doesn’t rely heavily on truckloads of exposition.
Despite all that exposition, there’s an undeniable ease to which these montages play out and, consequently, entertain. That’s perhaps the genius (if you’re willing to call it that) of Sorkin’s Molly’s Game; it takes a familiar convention, one that we’re accustomed to seeing used as a tool to excite audiences while simultaneously delivering information, and multiples it to the length of an entire movie.
Ultimately, however, these montages are a rather superficial way of digging into the heart of this story: Molly herself. The film is so intent on telling us all about her game that it eschews much genuine or significant character development. Molly’s relationship with her father, her parents marital troubles, her sense of self-worth, her drug addition are all thinly drawn, used as window dressings for the story.
For a film that purports itself to be a look at and investigation into Molly herself, it spends scant time giving the audience a thoughtful look at her beyond the necessary plot machinations. The excessive use of montages makes the film’s prioritization of plot over character and the result is a fun, yet disappointingly hollow exploration of a fascinating woman.