Chastain makes a meal out of Miss Sloane
Jessica Chastain’s career so far has been a mix of mild successes and flat-out triumphs, but her performance in “Miss Sloane” stands as a particular highlight. The film calls for Chastain to enter into her fierce, hard-charging, single-minded mode, an aspect of her screen persona that we’ve seen recently in some of her supporting roles (“Crimson Peak,” “A Most Violent Year”). Here we get it full-blast, in a movie in which her character is the star or subject of every scene.
She plays a Washington lobbyist in “Miss Sloane,” a workaholic who barely sleeps and eats only out of necessity, a strategic thinker who is always two or three moves ahead of her competitors. She is ruthless and secretive, ready to do anything to win. And she is rather amoral, but not completely. There are lines she won’t cross and lines she will, and, for the audience, trying to figure out which lines are which is part of the fun.
It must be said: There is just something satisfying in watching an actress tear into a role like this. It’s like a lioness chomping on a zebra. In “Miss Sloane,” Chastain’s lipstick is the colour of fresh blood, and her skin is as pale as a vampire’s. Sometimes she’s hard, sometimes she’s soft, but she is always focused, in a performance that’s more than a portrayal of female strength. It’s a demonstration of it.
She’s great. The movie is merely good. Still, good is good, especially when it provides this kind of showcase. Miss Sloane (Chastain) is the leading talent in a lobbying firm that seems to have no fixed principles, though the ideology leans toward the conservative. In an early scene, a U.S. senator comes to her with a proposition. He wants her to work on a campaign to turn women against gun control. He gives her his reasoning, and she listens patiently, then laughs in his face. So that’s one moral line she won’t cross.
The story shakes down as a contest over some impending legislation surrounding the gun issue. A bill imposing mandatory wait times is about to go to the Senate, and two lobbying firms are doing battle to sway Senators to their side. Miss Sloane, switching teams, leads the pro-gun-control forces, while her old firm — led by Sam Waterston at his coldest and Michael Stuhlbarg at his sleaziest — advocates for the gun lobby.
Two assumptions are implicit in Jonathan Perera’s script, so understood by everyone in this world that they never need to be stated. The first is that whichever side has the most money is almost always going to win. And the second is that senators aren’t senators for the sake of doing anything. They’re senators for the sake of keeping their jobs as senators. There’s not a principled politician in the entire film, and if this is anything like a real portrait of Washington life, things are even sadder than you think.
Perera is a first time screenwriter, and director John Madden (“Shakespeare in Love”) does his best to paper over weaknesses in the script. For example, though the movie is profoundly cynical about politics, there’s a weird naivete in its presentation of personal relationships. In one instance, Miss Sloane develops a cordial connection with one of her staffers (Gugu MbathaRaw) -- a young woman who survived a high school massacre in the 1990s. There’s only the most casual kind of closeness between them, but the movie leans heavily on that relationship, assuming emotional depths that aren’t there, and assuming we care more than we do.
Also, despite the evocative brilliance of Chastain’s portrait, Miss Sloane remains a rather shadowy figure. We want to know more about her — not more details or history, necessarily, but more insight, more sides to her. With some movies, you sometimes get the feeling that screenwriter told you all that he knows, and he only knew just enough to get by. “Miss Sloane” gives you a little bit of that feeling.
All the same, “Miss Sloane” is one of the year’s handful of great actress vehicles, and Chastain takes this role by the throat.
You want to see star acting on a grand scale? “Miss Sloane” is the movie to see.