The Story
Molly’s Game is a film based on true story of Molly Bloom – the Poker Princess who was running one of the most high-profile underground poker games for around a decade and was later accused of illegal gambling and money laundering.
The film takes us through her journey from professional skier with Olympic aspirations to the court room for charges for illegal gambling.
After having to stop her career in sports due to a trauma, Molly is trying to re discover herself under new circumstances and moves to LA for a year to think about what she wants to do with her life. There she gets a job as a waitress and ends up assisting her boss in running underground poker games that he was hosting. Even though Molly was completely unfamiliar with poker, she quickly learns how to appeal to the players and starts to earn plenty of cash from tips. Soon she becomes so good at organizing the games that her manager feels competitive and fires her.
Once fired, Molly starts organizing poker games by herself and the scale of the games goes higher and higher.
Controversy of Molly’s character:
It’s no secret that the poker world is a dirty place. People with tendency for professional gambling have a certain lifestyle that comes with it, which often involves excess consumption of alcohol and drugs, love affairs, intrigues, and gossips as well as emotional instability. Molly has a good stamina that allows her to feel empowered in this not so characteristic to her personality environment. She remains focused on running successful poker games and has no emotional attachments to any of the players, or their stories. Molly creates a perfect balance of having the relationships that kept everyone attending her games and not crossing the boundaries at the same time. Even though the film shows moments when Molly is consuming drugs and alcohol, there is no real shift from her moral values, and she has not become anything like the people who were attending her games. The moments when we see her abusing alcohol and drugs were unhealthy coping mechanisms that she adopted to survive in the extreme conditions that come with running an influential poker network.
It seemed like Molly has become successful very quickly as if she was managing it all seamlessly but eventually, we get to see the backstage of the games and discover the scale of threats and competition that came with the job.
Probably two main characteristics of Molly are resilience and her emotional intelligence. Molly fails many times during the film, and she demonstrates incredible resilience by getting back up and trying harder. Her emotional intelligence has allowed her to maintain relationships with the players and keep them engaged and interested, although holding strong boundaries at the same time. Her emotional detachment has made her so successful, as she wasn’t getting distracted by all the drama spinning around the games.
We can see both masculine and feminine sides of her character throughout the film. Her feminity was mainly expressed in how she was dressing and presenting herself. She was a very attractive woman and she was using her influence on men as a leverage. At the same time her masculine part of the character allowed her to have influence on the players and manage tensions between players, who were extremely powerful men.
Molly’s Fashion
Fashion has played a big part in painting the image of Molly Bloom’s character in this film. The story doesn’t quite allow us to make conclusions on Molly’s character till the end of the film. Is she involved in dirty games and politics between the players? Is she innocent? How far is she ready to go to save her poker game? Is she going to break down?
The outfits of Molly are telling us the story along with the events and characters.
Dynamics
The style pf Molly changes as the circumstance shift. She was looking youthful and relaxed when she was running her games in LA, wearing bright colors such as pinks and reds , sequined dresses, As she moves to New York she starts to wear darker colors, a lot of black in particular and uses more intense make up. She wears more adult looks, with heavy accessories and hardware dresses like heavy zips and chains. She slowly transitions from more adult and sophisticated looks to gloomy and dark. This shift was expressing the dark side where Molly was falling as her games became higher in profile and more dangerous.
The white fur coat and layered Chanel pearls have been demonstrating the high status and wealth that she achieved as she moved to New York and scaled up her games.
Molly was actively using sharp blazers and glasses to add businesswoman vibes to her style. The mix of tight dresses and deep cleavages with blazers and glasses were representing feminine and masculine sides of her personality.
As we transition to the movie’s present-day timeline — where Molly is meeting with her lawyer (Idris Elba) and preparing her case her style takes another shift. She starts to wear luxe sweaters and pencil skirts, creating more business-like looks. Molly appeared respectful of the law and ready to do what it takes to clear her name up.
Costume designing
Along with costume designer of the film Susan Lyall, Jessica Chastain was closely involved in creating the wardrobe for her character. According to Susan, she wanted to have an element of business-like looks and insisted on adding blazers and glasses to make her looks a little more appropriate.
According to Susan Lyall, the number of costumes in this film were just over 90, with about 70 of them being dresses. The director of the film Aaron Sorkin made it very clear that Molly should always look incredibly sexy. The real Molly Bloom claims to have never worn the same outfit in front of the same players. Thus, Susan Lyall had to create a new look for every game, even if it was to be a small episode for just a few seconds.
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