EuropaCorp
Jessica Chastain is only five foot four. And sure, when you see her standing next to Chris Hemsworth or Chris Pratt, she seems short. But when she’s in the center of the screen, wearing heels and looking down at you, she seems Amazonian. As Sean W. Fallon says, “Chastain is the Queen of all things that walk on the Earth, swim in the sea, and fly in the air. She is the Alpha and the Omega, the resurrection and the light, the sun and the stars, and the tea and the toast. She makes the sun rise and the moon fatten in the sky. She is the air that we breathe, and she keeps us warm in the winter and cool in the summer.”
As true today as it’s ever been. But I don’t think she’ll get nominated for an Oscar this year. Too many others in more critically acclaimed movies.
Miss Sloane comes from director John Madden and stars Chastain as Elizabeth Sloane, a work-obsessed lobbyist in Washington DC (where a tiny amount of the movie was filmed). The movies starts with Elizabeth being questioned by Senator Ron Sperling (John Lithgow) about something that sounds bad. So you know what that means: flashback movie!
So a few months earlier, after being asked by boss Pat Connors (Michael Stuhlbarg) to work on promoting the NRA for women, Sloane decides to take a job at a smaller, competing lobbying firm that’s doing just the opposite.
This other firm is headed by Schmidt (Mark Strong with a classic American accent) and is funding a Brady Bill related gun control law that the NRA is trying to destroy. Left behind is her former protege Jane (Alison Pill) and annoying boss (Sam Waterston), while at her new job she “befriends”/intimidates new co-worker Esme Manucharian (Gugu Mbatha-Raw). At first I thought it was a reference to The Manchurian Candidate, but instead I think it’s just a name they randomly picked.
The movie then shows the fun, if ethically dubious methods Sloane takes while attempting to achieve her goals. There’s a bit of political disconnect, because the movie seems to be pretending a pro-gun control position at times while at other times getting cynical about it. The only real message seems to be that lobbying groups are corrupt.
Sloane crosses moral lines and has an eye rolling set of interactions with a gigolo (Jake Lacy), which almost seem like they are meant to be prurient, but Chastain had a much sexier and more interesting relationship with Tom Hardy in Lawless. It’s enough that I still remember it vividly, despite the rest of that movie being pretty forgettable. So it’s a mixed bag.
I think Jessica Chastain is great here, practically exuding power off the screen, but having moments of true vulnerability and complexity too. The supporting actors are good too, with the particular high notes from Gugu Mbatha-Raw. And sure, the movie is shot quite well, for the most part. But the particulars of the lobbying efforts and trickery are lightweight and without real substance.
It’s unclear what sort of point the movie is trying to make at all; was there something planned to coincide with a theoretical Hillary Clinton victory? If so, I don’t get what this movie would even have said about that. It’s kind of a political fantasy, yet the movie is very clearly painting Sloane as near sociopathic. Perhaps that’s a secret point: that to succeed in politics, you must cross moral boundaries and be a sociopath.
You know, lack empathy, etc. But that may just be my biases. I don’t think the movie is much more than an average little story wrapped in the magnificent plumage of Jessica Chastain. I’ve seen worse.
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