Director: John Madden
Distributor: Belga Home Video
Duration: 127 minutes
Miss Sloane (DVD) – Movie Review
If you’ve always wondered what lobbyists do, Miss Sloane is probably a good film to give you an idea. Most people probably don’t even think about it, but we were surprised to see in this film how lobbying firms work, and how they can actually make a difference in political decisions. But how far can they go before they cross a line?
Elizabeth Sloane (Jessica Chastain) is a lobbyist, known for her perseverance and cunning thinking. She has worked on several high profile cases before, and built herself quite a reputation. Something has gone terribly wrong though, as the film starts off with her appearing at a congressional hearing, where she has to account for violations of Senate ethics rules she might have committed during one of the cases she lobbied while working for Cole Kravitz & Waterman. The story then goes back in time a few months, to the moment when Sloane’s boss Pat Connors (Michael Stuhlbarg) introduces her to a new potential client.
Bob Sanford (Chuck Shamata) is a representative of the gun industry, and wants Sloane to lead the opposition to the Heaton-Harris bill, which wants to expand background checks on anyone who wants to buy a gun. As Sloane actually thinks the bill is a good idea, she refuses to work for the weapon industry, much to the discontent of her boss. When she is later approached by Rodolfo Schmidt (Mark Strong), the head of a rivaling lobbying firm called Peterson Wyatt, he does her a very favorable proposition. Instead of lobbying against the Heaton-Harris bill, he offers her to lead the campaign to support the bill at his firm Peterson Wyatt. Sloane agrees to his proposition, and takes half of her staff at Cole Kravitz & Waterman with her.
The real work can begin now, and with her new team, Sloane starts to look for ways to convince the indecisive senators to vote in favor of the bill. She chooses Esme Manucharian (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) as her team’s media representative, and together they are making quite some progress. As her former employer did take on the task of lobbying against the bill, Sloane is even more eager to win, which makes her more nervous and more unpredictable as well. it causes quite some tension, not in the least when she tells the world in a live television debate that Esme was once present at a school shooting, a fact that she had rather kept private, as it’s a trauma she’d rather not be confronted with. Next to the opposition of Cole Kravitz & Waterman that she has to deal with, Sloane will now also have to deal with the cracks within her own team, if she ever wants to win this battle.
The film starts off at quite a rapid pace. A lot of dialogue and shifts between the present and the past make the story hard to follow at first. The first few scenes are mainly there to form an image of miss Sloane’s line of business it seems, and that it certainly does, even though not everything is clear from the start. Progressing more into the film and the case she is actually working on, the picture gets clearer as the focus is only on this particular case, while the story keeps going fast and has lots of unexpected elements. The film is quite long and the story only focuses on one character and one storyline. Nonetheless, John Madden keeps things interesting by shifting between past and present, keeping quite a fast pace and constantly adding interesting plot twists.
Director John Madden may have made some interesting choices to keep things looking fresh, but Jessica Chastain definitely had a great part in that too. Her character Elizabeth Sloane is a woman who has quite a complex personality, and Chastain manages to portray the different sides to her character very well. The supporting actors all did their fair share as well, but it’s really Chastain who carries the film from start to finish.
There is not much to say when it comes to extras, as there simply aren’t any on this DVD release. We can’t say it wouldn’t have been nice to have some extras, but we felt that a film like this, with such a heavy plot and quite a long duration, doesn’t really need any extra features to satisfy.
Conclusion
Miss Sloane is a film with quite an interesting and socially relevant subject, that is brought in quite an intriguing way. More than once you’ll be surprised at what miss Sloane’s got up her sleeve, and Jessica Chastain does a great job at portraying this complex character. This film is definitely worth the watch, you might even learn a lobbying trick or two.
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