John Madden (2016)
After an hour of getting bored and annoyed with Miss Sloane, I decided to cut my losses and left. The film wasn’t halfway through (a main reason for crying enough) – so the few comments below may be invalidated by what I missed in the second half. I doubt it, though.
Elizabeth Sloane is a ruthless political lobbyist in Washington DC. Jessica Chastain, who plays her, establishes Miss Sloane’s ruthlessness very quickly. She speaks rapidly, aggressively and monotonously. Every so often, Chastain stops talking for a moment and looks ‘vulnerable’ before moving on to her next scathing, self-assertive tirade. In a BBC interview this week, Chastain criticised critics who’ve complained that Miss Sloane is a ‘masculine’ character:
‘I want to go back to those people and say Elizabeth Sloane is a woman, so that makes her feminine. … Femininity for each person is whatever they define it to be, and to say that femininity is to be soft, kind, loving, compassionate and weak, and masculinity is aggression, power, ambition and strength – [we’re in] 2017 and we need to move away from that.’
I’d say Elizabeth Sloane is a masculine character in a different sense: the writer and director of Miss Sloane are men, the heroine reflects an antiquated male idea of what a ‘strong’ woman is like, and Chastain’s playing of the role panders to this. The screenplay is Jonathan Perera’s first and he’s young, which makes it all the more dismaying. Although John Madden knew better when he made Mrs Brown, he seems to have approached this film as a test of his directing manhood – anxious to prove he’s up to a ‘tough’ political thriller after doing time in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and its sequel. Madden lathers the soundtrack with Max Richter’s excitative music. The combination of the score and Jessica Chastain’s rat-a-tat-tat delivery is sort-of apt – the story concerns lobbying around a piece of gun-control legislation – but it’s wearisome.
The supporting instruments in this one-note symphony are, for the most part, Elizabeth’s lobbyist colleagues-minions. The quick-witted, competitive dialogue Jonathan Perera has supplied them with is Aaron Sorkin-inspired. Sorkin and David Fincher showed in The Social Network how well this kind of writing can work if the verbal combat is rooted in character but that’s not the case here: the effect is of actors, rather than the people they’re playing, fighting to be noticed. It’s positively restful in Miss Sloane whenever someone strikes a different, more nuanced note – as Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Christine Baranski and Mark Strong all do. As the head of a lobbying firm, Strong occasionally looks at the protagonist with a puzzled expression – as if he can’t understand why someone as talented as Jessica Chastain is performing so crudely.
I gather from Wikipedia that the bill to expand background checks on the purchase of firearms, the legislation at the centre of the film, eventually passes. Sad to say, but this now seems rather a far-fetched idea. It isn’t, of course, the fault of Miss Sloane but its pumped-up fiction has been comprehensively Trumped by the reality of contemporary American politics.
12 May 2017
