How Jessica Chastain Is Changing the Hollywood Game
In Aaron Sorkin’s directorial debut, Chastain tackles a challenging role—one that’s helping to redefine the rules for women
Annemarieke Van Drimmelen for WSJ. Magazine; Styling by Ludivine Poiblanc
Leslie Bennetts
IN THE OPENING MOMENTS of the gripping new movie Molly’s Game, a world-class skier has a traumatic accident that ends her athletic career. Armed only with steely defiance, Molly Bloom is soon running a notorious poker game that makes her millions of dollars, triggers an FBI investigation and endangers her life.
As Molly, Jessica Chastain delivers an unforgettable performance that earned her a Golden Globe nomination for best performance by an actress in a motion picture. The movie was written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, who was nominated for best screenplay. But neither of them dreamed up the film’s heroine—a real-life entrepreneur who recounted her adrenaline-fueled journey in the 2014 memoir called Molly’s Game: From Hollywood’s Elite to Wall Street’s Billionaire Boys Club, My High-Stakes Adventure in the World of Underground Poker.
Although she had lived the story, Bloom was stunned by the character Chastain created on camera. “I was blown away,” says Bloom. “To see how powerful Jessica is and how nuanced she is in communicating the things I was feeling—I just thought she was incredible. My family and close friends were like, ‘It was like watching you on-screen.’ ”
Achieving that effect was a formidable challenge. “The role of Molly is really complicated; she’s got all kinds of different sides to her. Jessica just took it like a piece of meat and ate it,” says Melissa Silverstein, the founder of Women and Hollywood, an initiative that advocates for gender equity in the entertainment industry and named Chastain as a co-chair for its 10th anniversary celebration last fall. “I feel like she’s her generation’s Meryl Streep,” Silverstein adds.
Sorkin credits much of the story’s impact to his 40-year-old star. “Jessica straps the movie to her back in the first scene, runs a full sprint and doesn’t let it off her back until the end credits roll,” he says.
Although Sorkin is a longtime screenwriter, producer and playwright whose credits include his Academy Award–winning screenplay for The Social Network, Molly’s Game is his directorial debut. Its timing was prescient, given the current firestorm over male abuses of power and the impossible dilemmas they pose for women; as a competitive skier, Bloom was coached by her authoritarian father, and her subsequent career as a poker impresario exposed her to brutal adversaries like the mob enforcer who inflicted a savage beating and shoved a gun in her mouth.
“To me, this story is a lot about patriarchy,” Chastain says over coffee in a Midtown Manhattan hotel near her apartment. “We do live in a patriarchal society. It means that men make all the rules. Molly’s father is the moral authority of the household, and you weren’t allowed to be a separate human being from his viewpoints. And, of course, in her business, the men were always trying to control the industry around her.”
Molly’s challengers include Player X, a composite character that was reportedly based in part on Tobey Maguire, Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio and other movie stars who frequented the exorbitantly expensive insider’s club known as “Molly’s game.”
“Player X is constantly trying to take away her business, and she’s trying to learn to play by his rules,” Chastain explains. “What was really upsetting to her was that there was no justice, no sense of right or fairness. The players were all men, and the rules would change based on the unfair whims of men. That’s a line Aaron Sorkin has in the movie, and I remember when I read the script, I was like, ‘What? Where has this writer been all my life?’ ”
At its core, the film is about power and the unequal ways that each gender is able to use it, with women subject to constraints and penalties that don’t burden their male counterparts. “Molly spends the movie surrounded by powerful men, and when she makes one of those men feel less powerful, the man has to banish her,” Sorkin observes.
Strikingly, however, the movie does not offer romantic love as the ostensible solution to a woman’s problems—a noteworthy choice for a story that revolves around a female star. When the FBI investigation into her business results in criminal charges, the prosecution leads to an unexpected intimacy between Molly and her lawyer, who is alternately exasperated and dazzled by her intransigence about the case. As played by Idris Elba, he’s such a sympathetic character that viewers may expect Molly to end up in his arms—as did Chastain: “It’s a female protagonist, and society has been conditioned that a woman needs to be in a relationship in order to be complete.”
But Molly’s Game is the anti-rom-com. “I was excited about the romantic and sexual chemistry the two of them would bring to their scenes, but for me, the relationship they develop is more interesting and less expected than a sexual relationship,” Sorkin explains.
Navigating life-or-death challenges without sacrificing her independence, sexuality or principles, the character of Molly as portrayed by Chastain represents such a departure from conventional gender stereotypes that its impact is startling. How is it possible that watching such a fierce screen heroine feels like a revolutionary experience? The hero who goes it alone, defies convention and breaks the rules while maintaining his basic integrity is a familiar male archetype—but it still seems thrillingly subversive to see a sexually desirable, thoroughly bad-*** woman go after money, power and success while avoiding romantic entanglements. “Molly’s character is as old as drama itself—we’re just not as used to seeing that character be a woman,” Sorkin observes.
The audience’s gender expectations are so ingrained that reversing the usual roles has a disproportionate impact. “This is about a woman just being fearless and going for it; it’s not about how men are going to save her,” says Silverstein. “That’s what makes it so liberating. We’re ready to see women as the heroes of their own story.”
Continue:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-jessica-chastain-is-changing-the-hollywood-game-1516189880
