By
Phil Leckman
Arizona Daily Wildcat
"The Contender" an authentic yet boring Washington tale
As this year's presidential elections veer ever closer to situation comedy, actually paying to see a film about politics may seem somewhat excessive. Yet this increasingly fuzzy line between politics and entertainment is precisely what a new political drama seeks to address.
"The Contender" opens six years into the term of President Jackson Evans (Jeff Bridges), a charismatic, successful Democrat with all of Bill Clinton's assets and none of his faults. The vice president has died in office, and Evans decides to make a lasting mark on national gender politics by choosing Laine Hanson (Joan Allen), a female senator, to fill the vacancy.
This bold move inspires women around the country but angers the oily Jack Hathaway (William Petersen), an ambitious governor who is passed over in Hanson's favor. Hathaway conspires with Sheldon Runyon (Gary Oldman), the Republican head of the House Judiciary Committee, to make Hanson's confirmation hearings as painful and embarrassing as possible.
When Runyon's office secretly leaks sexual photos apparently depicting Hanson on an Internet news site, a national scandal results. Hanson refuses to comment on the allegations, maintaining that her sex life is her business alone.
The building brouhaha threatens both Hanson's career and Evans's legacy, and the senator is rapidly forced into a choice between political survival and the integrity of her personal life.
This sounds exciting, but maintaining interest in a storyline that unfolds primarily in Washington offices and committee rooms is not easy. The filmmakers take obvious pride in their insider's knowledge of Beltway slang and obscure congressional rules. But while this signals authenticity, it does not always make for compelling cinema. At its worst, "The Contender" is like a dramatized version of C-SPAN - a talky muddle of procedures and points of order.
Despite these problems, "The Contender" does a fair job of keeping the plot moving. It benefits from its timeliness - while the sex-scandal plot is obviously Lewinsky-inspired, the film's depiction of Washington as a cynical land of spin and sound bites works as commentary on this year's mechanical and choreographed elections.
Able acting from the principal cast further helps things along. Oldman is especially excellent as a conniving political manipulator long emptied of idealism.
The filmmakers work hard to condemn such cynicism, doing their best to champion honesty and integrity over the scripted world of politics-as-theater. This constant moralizing frequently comes off like a bad campaign commercial, full of heavy-handed emotion and stirring music but grossly lacking in substance.
Even when it successfully gets its message across, however, "The Contender" ironically furthers the trend it sermonizes against. One cannot help but be struck by the integrity and appeal of the film's actors as they stare down their conniving opponents.
This is a political fantasy of a better world, but real-life politicians can only come off as pale and weak in comparison.
