The Contender

More a triumph of research than inspiration, “The Contender” is a savvy but ultimately bloodless political drama. More “Congressional Report” than “Inside Edition,” the movie promises steamy melodrama but offers us mostly dry reportage. Writer-Director Lurie can be congratulated on teaching us more than we ever wanted to know about the congressional confirmation process for political appointees. It seems that the Vice President has died (an event which occurs before the picture starts) and President Jackson Evans (Bridges) must name a successor. Lots of tongues wag when he passes over the obvious choice, heroic Governor Jack Hathaway (Peterson), and picks a smart, attractive woman, Laine Hanson (Allen), a liberal senator who switched from the Republican to the Democratic party on philosophical grounds. Then, much to the consternation of the director, nasty stories (complete with pictures) about Hanson’s wild sexual escapades in college begin to circulate. Illinois Congressman (and resident right-wing demagogue) Shelly Hanson (Oldman) catches wind of this and is determined to use the scandal to derail the President’s nomination. (Fortunately for him, he chairs the House Judiciary Committee, which oversees the confirmation process.) Even after two hours and twelve minutes of intelligent dialogue, I was left uncertain as to exactly why Runyon targeted Hanson the way he did, his rhetoric about her lacking “the potential for greatness” notwithstanding.

Is he simply a chauvinist? Is he mad at the President for some never-explained affront that took place in Hartford? Both? Neither? I was further mystified by the President’s failure to select Hathaway initially (never mind what we ultimately learn about him; that should not have been a factor at the time). The picture then becomes a series of set piece arguments and verbal sparring sessions between Runyon and Hanson, Hanson and the President, the President and Runyon, in fact, just about everyone except Hillary Clinton and Socks the Cat. Now, this is all well and good. As I said, I applaud Lurie’s diligence, his attention to detail (I am sure it is true that the President can have any food he wants prepared at any time, a fact which seems to delight Lurie to no end), and his willingness to try to make a feature film out of a civics lesson.

But all these conversations do leave one longing for a bit of, shall we say, action. Driving the movie is the burning question of whether Hanson actually did the salacious things of which she is accused, and, even more importantly, why she is so reluctant to respond to the accusations. As she puts it, “I won’t respond to these accusations because it’s not OK for them to be made.” The movie’s moral indignation stems from its conviction that men and women should not be held to different standards, sexual or otherwise. While it is certainly hard to argue with this position (or with the President’s rather self-righteous speech at the end in which he lays out his vision of America--perhaps the most passionate writing in the script), Hanson comes across as a bit of a prig, and even somewhat annoying in her refusal to take up her own defense. It strikes me that if women should not be held to different standards, that should be true for all standards, including those which govern how one responds to personal attacks, especially ones which threaten the institutions one professes to hold dear. All of this makes it hard to truly latch onto Hanson as a character we care about.

Though Allen gives a typically strong performance in the role, it is a muted and passive one. She is held in check throughout the picture, never really allowed to show any fire at all, to display any conviction other than that she is being ill treated by the process. And what is one to make of the scene towards the end when she cries in front of the president? It seems as if Lurie is daring us to find her unworthy. Fine. Hanson’s politics seem reasonable, but personally, I like my national leaders with a little more backbone. Lurie manages to get good performances from the rest of the cast. Bridges is a big, domineering president, the nature of whose character is left deliberately ambiguous throughout the picture. Oldman’s Runyon is a marvelous creation, part intellectual, part beetle, but he is almost too much the clichéd reactionary bogeyman; it would have helped to see that more drives him than personal vendettas. Sam Elliott leaves a very strong impression as some sort of half-sinister presidential advisor.

Christian Slater, playing a young and idealistic congressman who is shocked-- shocked --by the nasty game playing he finds in our nation's capital, pokes about in a role that is much less pivotal than Lurie seems to think it is. (There is a scene in which Runyon asks Webster whether he owns a dictionary. Now, given Webster's last name, this is pretty funny, but Lurie plays it so straight that it's hard to tell if he knows he just made a joke, and that's too bad.) In the end, there is a little (emphatically not a lot) more to the story than initially meets the eye. Lurie runs with what he has and makes the movie far more engrossing than in has any right to be, given that we never feel that anyone is ever in any real jeopardy. (If the biggest threat that your main character is facing is not becoming the Vice President, you might want to rethink your approach to suspense.) The movie is also startling in its utter lack of interest in how the events depicted might affect the 270 million of us who are not politicians and who do not live in Washington, D.C. There are a few nods to “the American people,” but precious few of them in evidence.

Almost every character is a self-absorbed Washington insider, and the movie suffers for the same reason that most movies about Hollywood suffer; regular people generally don’t care any more about the tribulations of politicians than they do about the tribulations of movie stars. “The Contender” gives us not a single character with whom the average moviegoer is likely to connect. Compare this with another political thriller, “All the President’s Men,” in which the protagonists were basically a couple of working stiffs (albeit smart ones), and the picture made very clear why the events they were investigating should matter to us. Perhaps it is the ultimate in cynicism to fail to be mortified by the news that political skullduggery occurs in our nation’s capital, but that seems to be about all “The Contender” has to tell us, and that’s not news in this day and age. Despite its high mindedness, almost painful timeliness (it sometimes seems that Lurie was in a contest to see how many references to recent events he could pack into the picture) and schoolboy intelligence, the movie never delivers any real jolts, intellectual or otherwise. Thus it falls short, since it is an article of faith that political movies should be held to the same standards as other kinds of movies: they can educate, sure, but they should entertain, too. (10/17/2000)