Miss Sloane (2016)
IMDB rating : 7.3/10 (as on 07.05.2017)
R | 2h 12min | Drama, Thriller
In the high-stakes world of political power-brokers,
Elizabeth Sloane is the most sought after and formidable lobbyist in D.C. But
when taking on the most powerful opponent of her career, she finds winning may
come at too high a price.
Director: John Madden
Writer: Jonathan Perera
Stars: Jessica Chastain, Mark Strong, Gugu Mbatha-Raw
A Chilly ‘Miss Sloane’ Makes a Lecture Out of Lobbying
STEPHEN HOLDEN
Jessica Chastain rules the
Washington-based political thriller “Miss Sloane” with such steely authority
that you are hard pressed to imagine another actress playing the imperious,
largely unsympathetic title character. In the opening moments, Elizabeth
Sloane, a formidable Washington lobbyist, legendary for her deviousness and
determination to win at all costs, impassively describes her professional modus
operandi. “Lobbying,” she declares, gazing straight into a camera, is about
“foresight.” It involves anticipating an opponent’s next move and calculating
your response ahead of time so that nothing takes you by surprise.
The palm-oil brouhaha
illustrates the savage, self-righteous tone of political warfare in a movie
without an iota of humor. In Mr. Perera’s long-winded screenplay, the
characters tend to give little speeches instead of conversing normally. Some of
the wordplay may be clever, but the attempts at witty repartee aren’t sharp
enough to be remotely amusing.
We learn early in the film that
Elizabeth lives on little sleep and relies on a roller coaster regimen of
uppers and downers. Outside of work, she has no personal life. Her needs for
intimacy are met by studly male escorts, one of whom, Forde (Jake Lacy),
becomes a regular. And as the interrogation led by a scowling senior senator
(John Lithgow) continues, Forde is called to testify.
Elizabeth is as chilly and
enigmatic as Maya, the C.I.A. analyst Ms. Chastain played in “Zero Dark
Thirty,” but with an added streak of ferocity. When under siege, she doesn’t
disguise her arrogance and contempt, and she bullies underlings.
But Elizabeth is not entirely
unprincipled. When she and her colleagues at the Cole, Kravitz & Waterman
consulting firm are approached by a National Rifle Association-like
organization and asked to devise a campaign to make gun ownership more
appealing to women, Elizabeth demurs. Having changed her views on gun ownership
“somewhere between Columbine and Charleston,” she now supports background
checks for gun buyers. To the fury of her boss (Sam Waterston), she refuses,
exits Cole, Kravitz in a huff and joins a scrappy boutique firm on the opposite
side of the issue.
Despite her principles, you
still have the uncomfortable feeling that winning a fight matters much more to
Elizabeth than the issues involved. She thinks nothing of betraying a friend if
it advances her cause. She pressures the film’s most sympathetic character,
Esme Manucharian (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), a victim of gun violence, to tell her story
on television.
Partly because “Miss Sloane” is
more a character study than a coherent political drama, it fumbles the issue it
purports to address, and it eventually runs aground in a preposterous ending.
In light of the recent presidential election, it all feels like small potatoes.
Read full review at NJew york times
Movie Rating ★★★☆
‘Miss
Sloane’ looks at the sausage-making of legislation and lobbying
Pat Padua
In Washington, there may be no
more loathed profession than that of the lobbyist. The political thriller “Miss
Sloane” paints a cynical behind-the-scenes picture of the great lengths to
which paid advocates will go to advance a cause. But even if you admire the
drive of its title character, Elizabeth Sloane, a sought-after lobbyist played
with cool ferocity by Jessica Chastain, you may not admire the means she uses
to achieve her goals.
The film suggests — gasp! —
that some lobbyists may not even believe in the causes they’re paid to espouse.
Framed by a congressional hearing that pits Elizabeth against Sen. Ron Sperling
(John Lithgow), the movie backtracks to find how the lobbyist got there.
The central figure of “Miss
Sloane” is a remarkably strong woman, but the film seems to equate lobbyists
with mercenaries, and worse, with prostitutes. This point is driven home by the
male escort (Jake Lacy) that Sloane, too busy to date, meets with for regular
trysts. (Naturally, the figure turns into an explosive literary device, primed
to go off at the most dramatically convenient moment. Chekhov famously
cautioned against introducing a gun into a story, unless the writer planned to
use it. The same applies to gigolos.)
Jonathan Perera’s dense script
hints at the rapid-fire bite of Aaron Sorkin, but without the humor. With the
help of deft editing and a sometimes frantic electronic score, director John
Madden (“Shakespeare in Love”) turns this story of backroom machinations into a
moderately entertaining thriller.
While Sloane’s bag of tricks
includes media manipulation, “Miss Sloane” leaves one intriguing question
unaddressed: Are movies like “Miss Sloane” themselves a potential tool in the
lobbyists’ repertoire? This taut political thriller, set amid the soulless
office architecture of K Street, has an ostensibly liberal bent, but its
antiheroine’s Machiavellian methods turn the film’s subject away from its
cause, portraying lobbyists and politicians in a dark light.'
Read full review at Washington Post
Movie Rating ★★★☆☆
Jessica Chastain dominates as a Washington power player
Nigel M Smith
For Jessica Chastain, there’s a
constant trait found in her best roles: the characters she plays are obsessive.
In Zero Dark Thirty she played the female operative behind locating Osama bin
Laden. Those obsessive qualities were also found in Crimson Peak’s Lucille
Sharpe, as well as Anna Morales, the Lady Macbeth-type in A Most Violent Year.
But Elizabeth Sloane, the tenacious lobbyist she plays here, is perhaps her
most obsessive character yet.
Director John Madden (reuniting
with Chastain following 2010’s The Debt) opens on a lucid Sloane peering
directly into the camera. “Lobbying is about foresight,” she says.
“Anticipating your opponent’s moves and devising counter-measures. I was hired
to win.” From the outset of Miss Sloane, first-time screenwriter Jonathan
Perera establishes Sloane as a fighter with laser-like focus on her prize.
In what we come to learn is a
flash-forward, Sloane is seen defending herself in a Senate hearing. The
sequence eerily calls to mind Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi hearing, with Sloane
soldiering on as the committee, led by an incensed Democratic legislator (John
Lithgow), tear into her. The destabilizing introduction gives way to a main
narrative that recounts the circumstances that planted Sloane in this scenario.
With another actor in the part,
Sloane could have come across as a stereotype: a robotic workaholic with no
interior life. Chastain overcomes Perera’s at times crass characterization by
imbuing her with an undercurrent of melancholy. Sloane never outrightly
expresses that she regrets the path she’s chosen. But watching Chastain, it’s
apparent that Sloane is unhappy.
As the stakes get higher for
Sloane and her group of young junior lobbyists who report to her with a mixture
of admiration and fear, she resorts to suspect means to stay one step ahead of
the opposition. Her end goal, however, is always admirable.
Chastain tackles this
challenging paradox by playing Sloane for who she is: tough, driven and
uncompromising. The warmth that earned Chastain her first Oscar nomination for
The Help is stripped away. As Sloane, Chastain’s only smiles are self-satisfied
ones. The actor doesn’t sweat to earn sympathy; it’s Sloane’s tenacity that
demands it. It’s a brave approach, and it works.
That central performance makes
Miss Sloane compulsively watchable even as Perera’s script grows increasingly
ludicrous in its final stretch (the film runs an unwieldy 132 minutes). What
was first a lean thriller morphs into twist-filled jumble, resembling the John
Grisham novels Sloane reads before going to bed. Chastain single-handedly
prevents it all from veering off the rails by dominating Miss Sloane with her
forceful presence. She grounds her heroine to ensure you’re with her.
Read full review at The Guardian
Movie Rating ★★★☆☆
Jessica Chastain's lobbyist a mass of compelling angles
Craig Mathieson
If you want to see an actor in
full, fascinating flight, then clock what Jessica Chastain does in Miss Sloane,
a middling Washington DC drama where she plays a lobbyist who can turn a staff
meeting into a verbal slaughterhouse.
Armed with rhetorical questions
that ricochet and a take-no-prisoners attitude, Chastain's Elizabeth Sloane is
a mass of sharp, compelling angles. Anyone who needs their protagonist to be
likeable shouldn't bother with the film.
Directed by English veteran
John Madden (Shakespeare in Love, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel), who wisely
gets close to Chastain but never impedes her performance, Miss Sloane mostly
reflects the language of television: a nod to Aaron Sorkin's West Wing and
Newsroom dialogue, the soap opera plotting of Scandal, and the hum of exercised
power from House of Cards. The plot's framing device, Elizabeth being
questioned by a Senate ethics committee, tidily sets up the showdown.
The film takes for granted
Washington's institutional corruption but ignores the ludicrousness of
America's non-existent gun laws, where you can be on an official terrorist
watch list and still buy an assault rifle without identification. Yet as much
as Elizabeth is a thorn in the side of the gun lobby and her former bosses,
played by oily efficient Sam Waterston and Michel Stuhlbarg, the considerable
repercussions she faces are somehow never framed in gender terms.
Aside from Esme, the film is in
awe of Elizabeth but too hectic to actually understand her. Like Faye Dunaway
in Network, she's a career woman who takes the edge off her driven work
schedule with pills and male escorts. And while her stud Forde (Jake Lacey,
doing his best Midnight Cowboy) tries to break through her barriers,
Elizabeth's complications are a little too familiar despite Chastain's
formidable work.
Read full review at Sydney morning Herald
Jessica Chastain stars as a ruthless lobbyist
who goes up against the gun industry in John Madden's topical drama.
Todd McCarthy
For all their prominence on the
American political scene, big-shot lobbyists have assumed a pretty low profile
in American films, which helps make the takes-no-prisoners Miss Sloane a
welcome arrival. Comparisons to Network would not be inapt for this cutting and
corrosive drama packed with high-stakes Washington, D.C., hustlers as cutthroat
as anyone on Game of Thrones or House of Cards, all determined not only to beat
but to annihilate their adversaries. If low-profile distributor EuropaCorp USA
can muscle its way into the spotlight against bigger Hollywood guns — not an
idle question — this tart, topical drama could attract a solid following among
audiences looking for something bracing and distinctive.
The last notable film that
comes to mind that centered on a modern political lobbyist was Jason Reitman's
amusing Thank You for Smoking (2005) but, given its concentration on women
trying to hold their own with the big boys, a more direct parallel is provided
by this year's Equity, a solid, if not entirely realized, look at women
fighting to make their mark in investment banking. Neither of these films
exactly set the world on fire commercially, and it may be that, these days,
this sort of intricate, densely scripted, fast-talking topical melodrama is
better suited to longform television than to the one-swing-and-you're-out
realities of theatrical release.
Certainly the characters and
political dynamics at the center of first-timer Jonathan Perera's pepper-pot of
a screenplay would be worthy of attention before and after the pressurized
events that make up the dramatic arc here. At the center of it is the never-ending
battle over gun control as seen from ground zero, that is, in the trenches with
the politicians and influence peddlers who are the ones who will determine
what, if any, legislation will ever get past the entrenched gun lobby.
The bulk of first-time
screenwriter Perera's adroitly shuffled narrative is devoted to the crafty
chess moves on both sides of the heavily charged issue. It's a tough climb, as
always, for the proponents of more gun control.
Crafty pros such as Waterston,
Stuhlbarg, David Wilson Barnes as Elizabeth's attorney and John Lithgow as the
senior senator who chairs the investigation of Elizabeth know exactly how to
amp up their key supporting roles. So do Mbatha-Raw and Pill, both of whose
characters have yet to come to terms with the vicious realities of life in the
big arena to the extent that Elizabeth has.
The one character that doesn't
emerge forcefully is Elizabeth's new boss, ironic in that he's played by an
actor who always lives up to his name, Mark Strong. Rodolfo is written as the
only principled person in the hornet's nest of lobbying, but how he's ever
succeeded in this world remains unclear, as does the nature of his relationship
with Elizabeth, whom he allows to run rampant. It's mysterious how the man has
gotten anywhere in a world where the dirtiest player usually wins.
Otherwise, director Madden, who
worked with Chastain on The Debt six years ago, maintains a rigorous grip on
the narrative and characterizations. He and cinematographer Sebastian Blenkov
have employed a very hard-edged visual style that further amplifies the
prevailing mentality and milieu. So intriguing are the driven, smart and
compromised characters, and so infinite are the dramatic possibilities at the
intersection of big business and politics, that a vastly expanded small-screen
take built around these characters, and others like them, would be quite
welcome. There are millions of stories in this particular naked city and, these
days, we don't need to be content with just one of them.
Read full review at Hollywood Reporter
Miss Sloane's Washington Is Rotten to Its Core
SOPHIE GILBERT
Elizabeth Sloane (Jessica
Chastain), the antiheroine of John Madden’s chilly new drama Miss Sloane, is a
character so archetypal, so prescriptive, that you imagine she wasn’t born in
normal human fashion but rather created in a lab from leftover vials of
testosterone and male tears. A pill-popping, spike-heel-wearing lobbyist, her
singular quality is ambition, and her only two human traits are reading John
Grisham novels and sleeping with male escorts. “I pay you,” she tells one of the
latter midway through the movie, “so I can imagine the life I chose to forgo in
service of my career.”
That Chastain imbues Liz with
some humanity is credit to the actress, but it’s also worth noting that the
lobbyist shines in comparison to her surroundings. Washington, in Miss Sloane,
is rotten to its core, a town riddled with graspers and crooked politicians,
and poisoned by its own greed. To be clear, the movie, written by the novice
screenwriter Jonathan Perera, is totally preposterous. But it’s also often fun
in a grim, burn-everything-down kind of way. It’s hard not to assume that its
release was intended to coincide with the historic presidency of another
“nasty” woman, but its vilification of D.C. also feels right on-trend with the
national mood.
In some ways, Miss Sloane is a
paint-by-numbers portrait of Washington, with its sweeping shots of the Potomac
and the National Mall, its scenes of steakhouse lunches and networking galas,
and its soullessness. There’s none of the humor or warmth of Madden’s strongest
films (Shakespeare in Love, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel), and the action
stays mostly in cold conference rooms, in generic luxury hotels, and on
cable-news sets. Chastain, armored to the hilt in cashmere coats, silk blouses,
and high-heeled boots, works admirably to make Liz seem realistic rather than
the most tired cliché imaginable of an unhappy professional woman, but she has
very little to work with. A lone nod to an unhappy childhood (“I grew up
lying,” she says at one point) makes up the entirety of the character’s
backstory. Otherwise, she’s just distilled ambition in human form.
The cast Madden has assembled
is terrific, and generally wasted. Mbatha-Raw has a handful of solid moments as
a do-gooder with a secret that Liz soon uncovers. Christine Baranski as a
female senator with a sharp tongue only gets a single scene. Allison Pill has
one of the movie’s most intriguing roles as Jane, Liz’s protegé-turned-rival.
And Michael Stuhlbarg is almost comically evil as a lobbyist competitor
greasing the wheels so the worst people in Washington can stay in power.
The movie does have flashes of
sharp insight, though—particularly when it’s revealing how fiercely Liz’s drive
and success enrages the men around her. Waterston, uncharacteristically
malicious as George Dupont, expresses with real rancor to his team the
importance of “neutralizing” her. Senator Ron Sperling (John Lithgow), who
leads the hearing investigating the allegations against her, is infuriated by
her poise under fire. Only Forde (Jake Lacy), a male escort with more defined
morals than anyone else in the film, seems persuaded that Liz is actually
human.
As a character, of course,
she’s not. She’s one of the uglier portrayals of a successful career woman with
a catastrophic personal life and various addictive tendencies in need of a
catastrophic fall to bring her back to Earth (see also: Homeland, Scandal).
That the ending of Miss Sloane (shouldn’t it be Ms. Sloane, come to think of
it?) is surprising only puts into sharp focus how hackneyed its premise is.
Portrayals of Washington and its most unscrupulous residents are only likely to
continue over the next four years, so it would be gratifying if some of them
could conjure up fresher takes than this grim portrait of a festering swamp.
Read full review at Atlantic
Movie Rating ★★☆☆☆
Jessica Chastain's lone wolf lobbyist treads well-worn
turf
Lindsey Bahr
There's never a hair out of
place in "Miss Sloane," a painstakingly slick political thriller from
director John Madden about a brilliant lone wolf lobbyist consumed with the
win. It's a wannabe Aaron Sorkin-meets-Shonda Rhimes glimpse into the hollow
and cynical world of inside the beltway dealings from first-time screenwriter
Jonathan Perera that's never quite snappy, insightful or salacious enough to be
as fun or damning as it should be.
All the pieces are there, especially in the
film's subject — the steely Elizabeth Sloane (Jessica Chastain), a pill-popping
master manipulator who is always at the ready with a perfect quip, biblical
verse or history lesson for the moment. She's the kind of do-it-all wonder
woman who is just as comfortable working a room of scuzzy Washington insiders
or pleading the fifth at an intimidating congressional hearing as she is
directing a team of spooks to illegally surveil someone with a camera-equipped
cockroach.
While it is fun to see Chastain
as a powerful boss lady, raising a martini glass to her competitors (including
a sniveling Michael Stuhlbarg) who she's just publicly embarrassed with another
move of political cunning, the story itself just skates along an already
well-established surface of corrupt Washington narratives. It fails to add any
distinctive flair to the genre, and, despite its sleek composition and
top-notch talent (including John Lithgow as a congressman), seems more like
prestige television than anything else.
Then there's the matter of
timing. "Miss Sloane" has the misfortune of coming out in this
political moment. Crafted in a different climate about a still-relevant issue,
it should have been more resonant. Instead, through no fault of its own, it
already feels woefully out of date.
Read Full review at chicago Tribune
No comments:
Post a Comment