Miss Sloane (2016)

(In French, On TV, May 2022) It’s really early in Jessica Chastain’s career to make any definitive assessment, but if the last ten years have been any evidence (crowned with an Academy Award in 2022), she has done an awe-inspiring job of typecasting herself as a competent career woman – and making sure she’s going to have a long career if she wants it. Squint, and she is the image of the characters she played in Zero Dark Thirty, Interstellar, The Martian, Molly’s Game and Ava – someone whose undeniable beauty takes a distant back seat to her cool, self-assured, utterly competent persona. One of the best examples of that chosen niche can be found in Miss Sloane, in which she plays one of Washington DC’s most feared lobbyists, someone so competent that she manages to change the national conversation about gun regulation (whew!) when she decides to campaign for effective laws on that issue. Yes, yes, that may be the film’s wildest excursion in fantasy – but Chastain’s challenge here is to make an unbelievable film believable and she does quite well at it. Her character (and it’s not an accident if the film is named after the character) is portrayed here as a magnificent mastermind – always two or three steps ahead of everyone, which is the bare minimum required when going against the American gun lobby. Somewhat reminiscent of The West Wing in acting like a left-leaning idealistic soapbox, Miss Slone nonetheless succeeds in presenting a clear-eyed, appropriately cynical view of the way power is truly wielded in the American capital – an exchange of favours, coercion, bribery, re-electoral chances and overlapping dirty tricks. Some great supporting actors round up the cast (most notably Mark Strong, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Alison Pill and John Lithgow), with director John Madden managing to give some energy to what could have been an overly didactic civics lesson. But Chastain is the anchor keeping the film grounded and compelling, at least until the script fails her and the disappointing conclusion arrives. While bits and pieces of the end do work well, there’s a sense that it doesn’t quite get to the next level, that it takes an easy way out, considering what the character should have been capable of achieving. But that may be a consequence of outsmarting itself — the script does so well through complex sequences that it arguably runs out of gas right at the climax. Still, I enjoyed Miss Sloane – it appeals to my policy wonk side, and Chastain is rarely less than compelling when she’s portraying highly intelligent characters going against the system. I can think of far, far worse fates than being typecast playing those characters.