Why Molly Bloom is the boss lady we never knew we needed
So, I’m in a bit of a Sorkin roll lately. After finishing his screenwriting Masterclass, I rewatched his directorial debut: Molly’s Game (2017). Back when I first watched this film a few years ago, I thought of it as a sort of female Wolf of Wall Street (2013). However, the second time around, I could really point out why these two stories couldn’t actually be more opposite. While in Jordan Belfort I find a greedy, juvenile and unscrupulous man; in Molly Bloom, I find many redeeming qualities that actually make her a business role model. But before I get to that bit, let’s briefly review how did she ended up getting her own biopic.
Disclaimer: Sorkin’s screenplay sticks so accurately to the major aspects of the actual plot that, for the purposes of my analysis, I will take the true story and the movie as one and the same.*
Molly Bloom’s story
As a young woman, Molly Bloom was a world-class skier competing towards the Olympics, until a serious injury brought her sports career to an abrupt halt. Needing a change of scenery, she moves from her natal Colorado to sunny California. Molly works there as a waitress until one day she gets offered an additional job as an office manager by a real estate developer. Little does she know, her new boss also runs underground poker games for Hollywood’s elite, which she soon gets tasked to organize. She learns the ropes of the game, rubs shoulders with the rich and the famous, and makes so much money from tips that she’s able to quit bartending.
It’s all glamorous and peachy until Bloom’s boss feels so threatened by her increasing independence that he proposes to stop paying for her office job and live off tips alone. When she doesn’t agree, he fires her but Molly sets up her own games thanks to years of networking, even taking key players (such as Player X) with her. Molly makes a name for herself and finds success until antagonizing Player X, prompting him to destroy her business by convincing the players to take their games elsewhere.
Bloom doesn’t stay on the ground from that blow for long, however. The phoenix rises once more from the ashes when she decides to take her games to New York, focusing on a slightly different target demographic. That’s when even bigger success comes with bigger problems: mafia members attending her games, drug abuse, switching to an illegal operation by taking a percentage of large pots, and getting investigated by the authorities for her loose links to a Ponzi scheme. All leading to an FBI raid that takes her empire down and ends up in federal court.
Don’t worry, no need for me to spoil the ending. Instead, let’s back up a bit and refocus on what makes Molly Bloom a badass business mogul.
She’s a fast learner
Rather than being a passive participant of her boss’s game, she observed how poker works and paid close attention to the players’ interactions. Additionally, what she didn’t know or understand, she googled. This last bit strongly caught my attention because it is a trick I learned a few years ago from one of my favorite bosses. Seems obvious and yet it isn’t. If there is one move that can be easily borrowed from Bloom, it’s this. When “asking the wrong question” feels daunting, just type it into a browser.. it works like magic!
Back to Molly, she’s a very clear example of how most skills can be attained on the job and how career path is an organic process. Let’s keep in context this woman ended up nearly by accident in an industry she had no clue about, only to become underground poker royalty in a matter of years. She went from serving people drinks, to game runner and operator, and ultimately, the bank. More growth than a lot of people get in a corporate lifetime.
She’s the embodiment of resilience
In the film’s opening monologue, Molly goes over her short lived skiing career. She mentions this part is not actually related to her story -just an opportunity to flip some people off-, but it is. This scene frames her character as the type of person that lets nothing stand in her way.
Her skiing experiences and the road to becoming Poker Princess were not short of ups and downs: literally breaking her spine, figuratively getting stabbed in the back by Hollywood, even taking a beating from a mobster. If still persisting after all that doesn’t qualify someone as a tough role model, I don’t know what does.
She knows her worth
When Molly’s horrible boss proposes that she do her day job for free, it’s easy to imagine a lot of people who, feeling vulnerable and overpowered, may have accepted those terms and begged to stay. Rather, Bloom pulls a Bender (from Futurama) and creates her own games (with just poker, unlike the internet meme).
Even when Player X sabotages those games, Molly has enough confidence to pull herself together and craft up a new plan, well aware of the extend of her abilities and the value she brought to the table. While reshaping her enterprise was tricky, her experience had prepared her for it.
Refusing to run a business in any way but her own terms may just be the most admirable of her entrepreneurial traits.
My Takeaways
Molly Bloom is without doubt a controversial character. Even an antihero, in some people’s eyes. In mine, a real human being full of flaws and virtues.
Was her business shady? A bit. Was it illegal? For the most part, no. Was it wrong? From a pragmatic point of view, I don’t see how. She provided her clients with a premium entertainment experience. The fact that it was underground poker is merely a circumstantial product feature.
Did she know she was getting involved with the Russian mob? Maybe not. Was taking a rake on the games really her last resort under the pressure of unfavorable market conditions? So it seems. She may very well be a legitimately good person who simply took the wrong turns.
The truth is we’ll likely never know the whole story. What I do know is that there is much to learn from it regardless.
I’d like to highlight that in spite of her admirable qualities, she did make one particularly big -albeit not illegal- mistake. Molly got so completely devoured by her job that it left no room for happiness, no opportunity to enjoy her fortune with loved ones, and no respite for self care. To what extend was it fate that brought her downfall, and just how much of it did she bring upon herself?
One way or another, I suspect this is not the last we’ll hear of the Molly Bloom story. If anything, I dare predict we’ll be seeing much more from this extraordinary business woman in the future (Molly’s Game 2: Return of the Poker Princess, anyone?)
* If you want to dig deeper into the facts behind Molly’s Game, you can always check History vs Hollywood out.
