With its lectures and endless political posturing, Miss Sloane is a relic from a strange time that most of us have hoped to forget; a time called 2016.
In a way, Aaron Sorkin kind of made American screenwriting better and in another he kind of ruined it. A lot of people, usually people who’ve never actually seen or read any of his scripts, don’t understand that his mass appeal is derived from a commitment to schmaltzy emotions rather than the enticingly quickfire rhetoric that is considered to be his easily forgeable signature.
Miss Sloane has a lot of fast-paced conversation and big turns in its story but is critically lacking in one thing. It is, through to its core, inhuman. It’s not that its principal character is unlikable, it’s that they’re unbelievable. Jessica Chastain’s titular character, Washington DC lobbyist Elizabeth Sloane, is a sitcom character. They’re an idea that is entertaining in small doses but could never stand up to intense scrutiny, which is unfortunately what this entire film is about.
This may be a result of director John Madden’s history and experience in television, all of his films have a certain TV mini-series quality to them, but he also has a fairly clear trend, in all of the films of his that I’ve seen, for objectifying femininity. He often shows it as something alien and completely separate from masculinity. An idea to be marvelled at from a distance rather than explored. “I’m not interested by gender”, Sloane empathically declares near the beginning of the film. If only that were the case. This film is obsessed with gender and the concept of the “powerful woman” but has very little interest in realism and even less in genuine character traits. Miss Sloane is the first writing credit of any kind from screenwriter Jonathan Perera and in true exciting spec-script style it is rammed with as many cliches and gotcha moments as could be fitted into the film’s unmercifully 2 hour plus running time. It is also inescapably political.
The belief that parts of the political spectrum are gendered is a common mistake which is shared, very assuredly, by Miss Sloane which wants to chew your ear off about a host of topics but, specifically, gun control in the United States as a partisan issue and, weirdly enough, an impassioned defence of the importation of palm oil. The fundamental problem being that these (and all of Miss Sloane’s other axes to grind, from the overlooked virtues of lobbying to a paradoxical condemnation of corruption) are all very real issues being barked at you by very unreal characters.
I have no doubt that people will draw comparisons between this film and Aaron Sorkin’s contributions to the popular TV show The West Wing and perhaps even the equally somber yet utterly ridiculous House of Cards, which brings up an important point about why the characterisation in Miss Sloane doesn’t work.
There is an essential difference between the way in which people in certain professions are perceived and the way in which they actually behave. Bankers and politicians have been subject to this distortion of perspective for quite some time despite recent efforts to humanise them and allow audiences to understand that they’re simply human beings, driven by the same basic motivations as anyone else, that have deliberately obfuscated their professions in order to make themselves appear indispensable.
TV often plays into these stereotypes for budgetary reasons, it’s quite costly and time-consuming to accurately recreate reality, but Miss Sloane plays into this and one of its undeniable achievements is in production design; keeping an impressive level of reality in a series of standardly chrome/glass offices and stock political locations like hearing rooms and shadowy parking garages. The issue arises from each character being, despite the best efforts of the actors, completely one-dimensional. Sorkin doesn’t pin all the emotional responsibility on his actors, he places them in hokey situations that result in Richard Curtis-ian levels of emotional outpouring, so you go along with it. Miss Sloane has all the stump speeches and all the foibles but none of the self-awareness required to pull off its absurd, but very grounded in reality, story (the climax of which features a live remote-controlled cockroach which is piloted by a gaming pad, a plot point also featured in Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element).
The overriding question you find yourself asking about this film is “why?”. Why this? Why now? What did the producers believe an audience would derive from the experience? Miss Sloane is, quite clearly, a remnant of America’s politically charged election year films. It’s very reminiscent of Clint Eastwood’s Sully (a film on the opposite end of the spectrum which I found to be equally stupid, only in different ways). It contains a lot of talk about “just getting the job done”. The leadership attitude, the fire that a person takes for having it, moral upstanding in the face of unfair scrutiny, the tenacity in living such a solitary lifestyle, remote-controlled spy cockroaches.
Considering how it’s about lobbying, you’re expecting the film to make a thematic connection between the all razzle-dazzle manipulation of the plot and the nature of the profession; but it never comes. Instead it’s all about how appearing to be heartless and egotistically obsessed with winning for the sake of winning doesn’t mean you aren’t actually a selfless hero who fights tirelessly for ethical causes. Much in the same way that Sully played up the idea of Average Joe being victimized by pointless bureaucracy, Miss Sloane is a distinct slice of neo-liberalism that very much wants you to root for the concept of ends justifying means and a take charge attitude that causes you to unrepentantly talk down to all those stupid bumpkins.
As a thriller you have to admire how often it’s able to create a sense of tension, or even motion, during a reductively flashy story with very few major plot beats. But as a drama it is always being played to the nth degree and still completely forgettable. If you’re over 2016 then you’re over Miss Sloane.
Miss Sloane will be released in UK cinemas on May 12th.
