Here is your 10-day notice to clear your schedules for the December 9 opening of Miss Sloane. As you will read below, this is not a perfect movie. It’s preachy. But the performances are masterful.
Miss Sloane (Jessica Chastain, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Mark Strong, Sam Waterston, John Lithgow, Michael Stuhlbarg, Alison Pill) – Oscar hype surrounds this Washington thriller about a lobbyist obsessed with winning at all costs. Jessica Chastain (Zero Dark Thirty, The Help, The Martian) locks in an Oscar nomination as Elizabeth Sloane, a ruthless, stop-at-nothing iceberg whose manipulation skills are unmatched. She doesn’t sleep, pays for sex, threatens, spies and ruins anyone who gets in her way.
When her boss (Sam Waterston) sets her up to meet with a Second Amendment gun rights fat cat who wants her to help win over women, she essentially blows him off. After getting reamed out, she quits the firm, takes half her staff and heads over to a third-tier lobbying firm to lead the effort to pass a bill that would require background checks.
The cat-and-mouse between her and her old employer keeps the audience on the edge of their seats. She preaches to her staff the need to stay ahead of “the competition,” parceling out selectively information even if it means lying to them or setting them up. Anything to win! This is a dirty game and neither side plays fair.
Jessica Chastain is total ice, reminding me of Glenn Close’s character in Damages. It isn’t that she doesn’t have feelings; she represses them. When she suddenly shows real emotion in an unexpected scene, she almost can’t handle it. When an associate who she sets up almost gets killed, she seems moved but then rationalizes it away.
The supporting cast is superb. Waterston (Law and Order, Grace and Frankie, The Newsroom) is every bit as stoic and evil as Sloane. Mark Strong (The Imitation Game) as the head of her new lobbying firm sells out to the devil in the quest to win but draws lines that Miss Sloane never does. Alison Pill (The Newsroom) plays Sloane’s dutiful assistant who uncharacteristically shows moxie when she doesn’t go to the new firm with the boss. Michael Stuhlbarg (Arrival, Steve Jobs, Trumbo) plays her former colleague who is the old firm’s strategist and antagonist. Oscar winner John Lithgow plays the senator who goes after Sloane for her questionable lobbying practices. But the best performance belongs to Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Concussion) as the anti-gun associate who gets used … even abused … by Sloane. What a cast!
I wanted to love this film, and I certainly liked it a lot. But it is very preachy about how broken Washington is due to lobbyists and how evil the gun lobby is. And while I agree with both of those points of view, I really wish this film had avoided beating the audience over the head with those messages. To me, that is a script problem. This was Jonathon Perera’s first screenwriting effort and no script doctor was used on the film. This is both unusual and perhaps unprecedented. It shows.
If you like political films and you love great acting, Miss Sloane is a film you will not want to miss.