Before she was dubbed the “Poker Princess” by the tabloids, Molly Bloom was an Olympic-class skier with a near-mythic tolerance for pain and ambition. Her professional downfall—caught mid-air on a mogul course in Park City—wasn’t just a career-ending crash; it was a pivot point. What followed wasn’t the standard tale of recovery, but rather a reinvention steeped in calculation, resilience, and unspoken privilege.
Aaron Sorkin’s Molly’s Game (2017), adapted from Bloom’s memoir of the same name, isn’t really about poker. Nor is it about glamour, celebrity, or even crime—at least not in the conventional sense. It’s about access. Control. The choreography of influence and the economy of silence in circles where power isn’t worn, but implied.
Jessica Chastain plays Bloom with a poise so exacting it could pass for armour. She’s not performing a role; she’s executing a strategy. Her private high-stakes poker empire—hosted in penthouses and glass-wrapped private residences—was frequented not by the reckless nouveau riche, but by those accustomed to running empires. Hedge fund managers, investment titans, studio heads, and minor royalty played in her games. Not for the thrill of the cards, but for the theatre of exclusivity.
Sorkin, in his directorial debut, takes his trademark dialogue and pares it down to surgical effect. Every word, every beat is loaded. The courtroom interplay between Chastain and Idris Elba—who plays her reluctant but principled attorney—is less legal drama and more dialectic on dignity and leverage. When Bloom refuses to name her players, even under the full weight of federal prosecution, it’s not just noble. It’s economically rational. She understood the value of discretion better than the Bureau ever could.
The film’s power, however, lies in what it withholds. Bloom doesn’t gamble herself. She simply builds the room, sets the temperature, and understands precisely how far each player is willing to go to win—then lets them destroy themselves with aplomb. There’s a reason the poker scenes are often shown in tight, suffocating close-ups: this isn’t about the cards. It’s about proximity to power, and the psychological tax of managing it.
To the discerning observer, Molly’s Game also serves as a fable for a particular kind of modern entrepreneurship—one that thrives in the liminal spaces between regulation and reinvention. Much like a closed investment circle or a sovereign wealth syndicate, her enterprise operated on trust, confidentiality, and a certain social choreography that couldn’t be taught, only inherited or intuited. That the DOJ eventually tried to quantify her influence in wire transfers and gaming licenses only underscores their lack of understanding.
Today, of course, the appetite for high-stakes play persists. It’s simply moved online—muted in tone, but not in consequence. From crypto-enabled platforms to invite-only digital salons, the spirit of the game continues. Even offerings like NetBet online roulette speak to this evolution: frictionless, discreet, and just unpredictable enough to remain compelling for those who don’t need to win, but enjoy the performance of risk.
And that is, ultimately, what Molly’s Game reveals so elegantly. This is a film about performance—of gender, of civility, of power. Bloom curates the illusion of indulgence while orchestrating absolute control. Her restraint is her greatest asset, not unlike the finest investors who pass over immediate returns in favour of enduring, generational advantage.
Unlike other entries in the gambling genre, there are no wild-eyed antiheroes or ruinous montages. There is no moral comeuppance or cautionary tale. What we’re offered instead is a woman navigating a system she didn’t build but learned to manipulate, until she was asked to pay for knowing too much.
In that, Molly’s Game becomes something rare in contemporary cinema: a meditation not just on wealth, but on the etiquette of power, and the social cost of operating too successfully in a world that was never meant to let you in.
Jessica Chastain stars as Molly Bloom in Aaron Sorkin’s stylish directorial debut—an incisive meditation on influence, risk, and the opaque etiquette of power among the ultra-wealthy.
