Miss Sloane

In Miss Sloane, Jessica Chastain is ferocious, fierce and unpredictable.  It's a nice change of pace from her past few appearances in big budget duds like The Huntsman: Winter's War and Crimson Peak, both of which didn't know what to do with her and stuck her into boring roles.  The movie itself is entertaining in its own way, but not quite up to the level of her performance.  That would have really been something.

Chastain is Elizabeth Sloane, a relentlessly driven and high powered Washington D.C. lobbyist.  She's the type of backstabbing opportunist who will do anything to get ahead.  She uses her colleagues to get what she wants, and has no time for personal relationships.  She also seemingly has no time for sleep.  She pops pills to keep her energy up, instead.  She embodies the idea of gaining success at any cost, so she pretty much is the ideal representation of Washington politics.  This creates a tricky balance for the film, which first-time screenwriter Jonathan Perera handles successfully.  We don't fully like her, but we do understand her, and we are fascinated and want to learn more.  She is not a warm lead character, and we are not supposed to warm up to her.  She is a tool the filmmakers use to throw us headfirst into the world of politics.

Now, I obviously have never been inside politics, but the dialogue sounds right.  Everybody is out for themselves, but nobody is truly right or wrong.  The writing also has a fast-paced style that keeps the action at a brisk pace.  As the film opens, Miss Sloane is working for a powerful firm headed up by George Dupont (Sam Waterson).  He wants her to come up with a political campaign that will make guns more comfortable with female voters.  She not only rejects this idea outright, but she up and leaves the firm, taking most of her staff with her.  Not only that, she joins up with a nonprofit group led by a man named Rodolfo Schmidt (an understated and effective Mark Strong), who is trying to push a gun control bill.

The most interesting part of Miss Sloane for me is how the movie shows how Sloane and her cohorts must try to get people to back the bill.  They not only hit the streets, talking to various power players in Washington to back it, but they also hire paid actors to sit in the audience at political events in order to ask loaded questions, We quickly understand how Sloane works.  Her main ambition is to win.  She even claims at one point that she doesn't have any personal connection to gun control or the fight behind it.  She simply sees this bill as an impossible situation, and she wants to succeed in order to prove that it's not impossible.  She knows what she's getting into.  Her main concern is that she wants another achievement on her long list of personal and political endeavors. 

We also quickly understand that she is not afraid to use some of her fellow workers to her advantage.  When she learns that one of the people on her team (Gugu Mbatha-Raw from Birth of a Nation) is a survivor of a high school shooting from years ago, she uses this to her advantage, and makes her an unwilling face of the campaign by bringing it up during a live debate.  Elizabeth Sloane sees the opportunity, and takes it.  She also makes no apologies, and is so driven to succeed that she does not care who she takes with her.  The young woman played by Mbatha-Raw does not want to be a public face for gun control, but Sloane gives her no choice.  This is what I was talking about earlier.  The movie is not exactly out to make us like Sloane, but we become interested in watching how she works, and what she will do next.

This is also the point where Miss Sloane ultimately starts to go off the rails just a little.  While it remains interesting and I am recommending the movie, I do kind of wish they had stayed with the approach of just showing us the political machine, and the process.  Instead, little by little, the movie throws in some melodramatic touches and subplots that seem like something out of a prime time soap opera.  Even so, Chastain remains dynamic and you can't take your eyes off of her.  I even enjoyed some of the big and broad plot revelations that happen in the later part of the film.  But it also gets to be a bit too much, complete with an overly staged climax that comes across like something out of a political potboiler.  The movie starts out honest and fascinating, but by the end, it's become a bit too dramatically convenient.  I was still enjoying myself, but kind of missed the honesty.

The character of Miss Sloane is so complex and fascinating, she would be fun to watch in just about any movie.  Fortunately, while the film itself isn't quite up to her character, she is always there to hold our interest.  Even when the movie is aiming for melodrama, both the character and Chastain's performance is always there to remind us of her power.  And while the movie itself might get a little tarnished by its plot, it retains that power all the way through.

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