The Contender is about power and scandal. Political intrigues thicken when Democratic President Jackson Evans (Jeff Bridges) chooses Laine Hanson (Joan Allen) as vice president over the popular Jack Hathaway (William Petersen) – he wants to go down in history as the first president to appoint a woman to the job.
However, reports that Hanson took part in a college orgy leak out, mostly, like the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky affair, on the Internet.
This is devastating ammo for the Republican congressman Shelly Runyon (Gary Oldman), head of the vice-president confirmation hearings, who wants her out. Interestingly, Hanson, who’s atheist, anti-guns and pro-abortion, refuses to dignify any questions about her sex life by discussing the rumoured orgy.
This makes for an absorbing drama, filmed in close-up, the camera shifting from face to face, conveying a sense of power, of intense,
intimate conspiracy and counter-intrigue. Looks say as much as words and writer-director Rod Lurie is helped by brilliant acting, especially from Bridges and Oldman. You feel you’re getting a kind of authenticity about people in high places, that this is what happens behind closed doors at the White House. The Contender packs a lot of issues into its running time: the clash between liberalism and conservatism; media ethics; the value of the presidency in a post-modern age of hard-sell, of the image über alles. Great stuff, especially as they’re explored in a tight, neat movie with the pace of a thriller.
The film is also a comment on Clinton and Lewinsky’s hanky-panky, suggesting that the media should mind its own business. Yep, you are getting a whitewash on the White House and that’s where the movie becomes unstuck. President Evans is too good to be true – steadfast, ethically sound but cleverly manipulative. It takes a real man to help a tough cookie like Hanson get what she wants. You feel the movie’s striking a liberal blow for women, but there’s a shot that undermines it. Evans and Hanson have a Kodak moment on the lawns of the White House. They’re filmed romantically in silhouette, in moonlight, and suddenly it all becomes visually a fairy tale, a happy-ending movie, unreal.
In this scene, the movie cops out, going soft on us instead of having the courage of its sexual convictions. Add to this a plot that resolves itself by using skeletons in closets as a deus ex machina and closes with a grandstanding speech about democracy to lots of applause, and you’ve got the usual rah-rah movie about making the US safe for democracy even if Big Arnie and his bazooka wasn’t there. American hearts will glow, but the rest of us could cringe at how phoney a potentially brilliant film becomes.