Review

Miss Sloane

Lobbyist Elizabeth Sloane (Jessica Chastain) exploits the past of her operative Esme (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) in John Madden’s Miss Sloane, a cautionary tale of political intrigue.
Lobbyist Elizabeth Sloane (Jessica Chastain) exploits the past of her operative Esme (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) in John Madden’s Miss Sloane, a cautionary tale of political intrigue.

Presciently, with our political system devolving further and further into win-at-all-costs amoral chaos, and our politicians thoroughly bought and paid for by giant corporate America, John Madden has seen fit to make a film about one of the more contentious figures on Capitol Hill: The modern lobbyist. Working the system for their clients, the lobbying arm of the political industry has more to do with American governance than anybody -- save their firms -- should feel comfortable with, but because the nature of their work is largely privatized and done outside the public sector, little is revealed to the unwitting public about their influence.

It is therefore appropriate that Elizabeth Sloane (Jessica Chastain), a hugely successful lobbyist known for her ruthlessness and tireless crusade to win, is the film's central protagonist. By design, we are never sure what to make of her, until she sees fit to inform us, and even then, she's a wildly cagey figure. She is the embodiment of the merciless nature of the business, the viciousness promoted when policy comes head-to-head with profit-making.

Miss Sloane

86 Cast: Jessica Chastain, Mark Strong, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Alison Pill, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jake Lacy, Sam Waterston, John Lithgow, David Wilson Barnes, Dylan Baker, Raoul Bhaneja, Chuck Shamata

Director: John Madden

Rating: R, for language and some sexuality

Running time: 2 hours, 12 minutes

When we meet her, she's talking with her attorney (David Wilson Barnes), preparing for a Senate congressional hearing and anticipating the grilling she's about to get. Advised to do nothing but plead the Fifth, she instead cracks, and begins arguing her points, essentially waiving her rights and allowing the wolves, as it were, to pass through the gates. The film backtracks from there, taking us to the very moment when she decides to leave her huge lobbying firm to instead back a small boutique nonprofit, whose mandate is to pass a mandatory background check for gun purchases, a cause that has withered and died under the political blowtorch of the gun lobby for decades.

Taking a large portion of her team with her -- though notably not her right hand woman (Alison Pill), who sees this platform as an utterly lost cause -- Sloane starts her team on their collision course with her old firm, led by the inscrutable George Dupont (Sam Waterston, happily playing the villain), and henchman Pat Connors (Michael Stuhlbarg), a pair who not only want to beat down the proposal on behalf of their Second Amendment toting clients, they want to eviscerate Sloane for having the temerity to challenge them in the first place.

What comes after could be called a game of cat-and-mouse, if the cat were lobbying firms, and the mouse American democracy. With her old firm, now attached to the gun lobby, working tirelessly against her, Sloane consistently acts in unexpected ways -- such as when she suddenly throws one of her own operatives (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) into the public eye as a survivor of a high school shootout -- throwing them off balance. Just when it seems their ruthlessness will finally get the better of her, she throws them off course again and again.

In short, we're dealing with the sort of long-con film in which many things we are supposed to be taking for granted turn out to be other than what we assumed. The difference here, of course, is both the political context, and the gender of our protagonist. The screening I attended was introduced by a high-ranking member of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania who proclaimed herself a "nasty woman," suggesting the film was about similarly disposed females. The term, of course, refers to the faction of left-leaning women who choose to use the president elect's off-the-cuff criticism of his campaign opponent as a means of describing women committed to political change while no longer being nice about it.

In that sense, you can understand why Sloane could serve as a sort of fictional inspiration for the movement: Known for her tenacity -- she rarely, if ever, sleeps, keeping herself awake with a combination of pills and her own ferocity -- and her utter devotion to her cause, she appears thoroughly indomitable. She eats at the same place every night so as not to cloud her mind with choices, and limits her romantic involvement to occasional paid-for trysts with a doe-eyed hunk (Jake Lacy), who is expected to get on with things with the barest minimum of conversation. Sloane, in short, is everything for which men are so often celebrated: all-consumed with their career to the exclusion of everything else around them (see Saban, Nick).

Interestingly, she also happens to be on the liberal side when it comes to the issue of gun control, which puts those of us of similar political persuasion in a ticklish spot: Do we root for the unscrupulous lobbyist who actually seems to be changing the tide on the gun control issue, despite the fact that she's dishonest at best and borderline ethically psychotic? Can we separate our desire for political change from the manner by which it is being achieved? Smartly, the screenplay by Jonathan Perera, making his cinematic debut, doesn't let the audience off the hook for their convictions (at least until the film's too neat final gambit). Even as her boss (Mark Strong) excoriates her for her methodology, he can't help but be impressed by the results she is able to achieve.

Of course, for a film seemingly hellbent on breaking any whimsical notion of how politics works in this day and age (one of Sloane's oft-used quotations notes that the word "cynical" is only used by people whose naivete remains paramount), the film's ending, in which all things happen for a good reason, releases the audience from its gloomy death grip just in time for the credits to roll. It's possible Perera, like the rest of us, couldn't bear the thought of the special interests completely taking over our system of government, but you can imagine Sloane herself shaking her head at our facile naivete.

MovieStyle on 12/09/2016

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