#MEANDER MOVIE ENDING EXPLAINED FULL#

She hires Charlie Jaffey (Idris Elba) to represent her, then incessantly annoys him with her staunch refusal to turn on her players to save herself.

Two years later, she’s arrested on federal charges related to her involvement with the Russian mob. As everything escalates, one of her players rats on her to the FBI, forcing her to quit the business. Smarting from the loss, she moves to New York to start fresh with a new, optimized game, but she wades in over her head, grows dependent on drugs to keep up with the demands of her work, and inadvertently becomes entangled with organized crime. She pushes herself to learn everything she can about poker so she can bring Dean’s game to the next level, creating a runway to splinter off, poach players, and start her own game-which swiftly falls apart after a conflict with alpha/demon Player X (Michael Cera, as phenomenally douchey as Strong).

#MEANDER MOVIE ENDING EXPLAINED FULL#

After crashing out of the qualifiers, Molly moves to Los Angeles and stumbles into running a poker game for her day-job boss Dean (Jeremy Strong, in full Succession -pilot sicko mode). The rest of Molly’s Game never lives up to the promise of its first scene. What results is a horrifying, gut-punch inversion of the joy of watching an athlete reach their borderline-inhuman peak of achievement, and it frames the movie with a very specific question: what happens when you come so close to accomplishing what you spent years of your life working toward and fail horribly, through no fault of your own? All this narrated context-the past injury, the present confidence, the future plans-amplifies the tension of the moment, both by delaying the inevitable event and by giving it greater emotional depth. It’s a fluke, and it’s intensified by a past fluke: her spine is held together with a morass of metal after it “exploded” for no clear reason when she was 12. The question isn’t whether she’ll make it to the Olympics but whether she’ll medal once she’s there.īut a frozen pine bough, scattered along the course for visibility, catches one of her skis at the exact right angle to make her lose control just as she’s about to clear a jump, sending her crashing and sliding into a cluster of spectators. As older Molly keeps feeding us context, she clarifies that whatever awful thing happens will be particularly devastating because young Molly-as well as her coach and her heavily invested father, played by Kevin Costner-imagines the qualifier as a formality leading up to the real challenge. An older Molly, in voice over, describes a poll that asked, “What’s the worst thing that can happen in sports?” Answers range from losing a Game 7 to falling to a rival to placing fourth at the Olympics-meditations on the theme of not quite making it all very poignant to me, a Wisconsin sports fan, and all ways of letting us know that this run will culminate in something far worse than any of those things. The movie begins with young Molly Bloom (Jessica Chastain), the third-best women’s moguls skier in the United States, at the top of a course, bracing herself for an Olympic qualifying run. What I am embarrassed to admit is how I cried the first time I watched Molly’s Game, choking out loud sobs during the first scene, right after the first sentence of voice-over dialogue, and then sniffling for the next hour or so.

I’m an easy mark for movie magic-swelling music, emotive performances, expansive visuals, the impossible fantasy of a tidy ending-so I’ve cried more times over movies that I’ve forgotten or hated than I have about significant events in my own life. It doesn’t matter how many times I’ve seen it, if I relate to its story, or if I like any of the characters. I’m not embarrassed to admit that I cried the first time I watched Molly’s Game whenever I watch a movie, the odds are in favor of me crying.

Meander movie ending explained