Strange Vistas

johnmadden

Jessica Chastain on the poster for Miss Sloane

(Contains spoilers for Miss Sloane. Just as well, because I can't recommend it)

There are hacks to writing smart characters that make them all look and sound the same. You write their lines shorter, faster, have other characters speak slower or act baffled every so often, have them ask questions that the lead then has to explain. If you are not sure that'll do the trick, then you make the character keep others in the dark, hide information from the audience, and pull out a surprise every few minutes.

Stick to that, and they won't end up coming across as smart – they'll be a smart-mouthed asshole.

Unfortunately for us as viewers, Miss Sloane goes down that exact path. It comes across as wanting to be Aaron Sorkin, without his flair for archetypes or percussive dialogue. It's all a long set up for the ending, and that ending is a kamikaze run on a senator who the movie introduces as a gloating, crusty antagonist, yet later becomes clear is partly another victim of the situation. Sloane's self-righteous takedown makes no sense, and doesn't even reach fridge-logic status: the credits haven't even gotten started when you are already feeling sorry for the target of her suicidal run.

Worse, her ultimate plan was setting in motion the thing that nearly derailed her team's original goal of getting a bill passed... and she enacts it just at the time that they are winning. It is her self-inflicted melodrama that almost kills the bill they are pushing for, not her opponents. That the movie (and character) think we should celebrate her, just because her plan is to cause self-harm and then return things to a status quo, is baffling.

This is not someone righting the wrongs of her past with one last push. This is someone whose entire, self-contained plan starts with damaging their own cause. Nevermind the character: the writer thought that a scheme where Sloane's entire clever plan, her trump card, ends up with them being back to where they started before she enacted it in the third act, was a brilliant reveal.

In a movie this perfunctorily written, you could try and salvage the performances. We almost get that in John Lithgow as Senator Sperling, when he's being half coerced and half bribed into attacking Sloane. His reluctance does more to humanize the senator in one scene than Jessica Chastain does to her character in the entire movie, because Chastain... Chastain has one character, and by god, she's going to play it over and over. Her Business Lady Macbeth in A Most Violent Year was a better use of her limited range.

Miss Sloane is the kind of movie where the character has to keep its one-upmanship with its opponents throughout the film, so they can continue surprising you with their cleverness. If done well (The Usual Suspects), things fit perfectly at the end. If not, the movie ends up pulling dirty tricks and non-sequiturs to be able to get one last gotcha!, and the audience becomes just another opponent.

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