The Contender

10 April 2012

Written and directed by an ex-film critic, Rod Lurie, The Contender is great fun. It proves that at least Lurie's days at the movies weren't wasted. If only by default, he's learned the skills of entertaining, informing and compelling us to keep looking. I haven't enjoyed a political melodrama more since Otto Preminger's Advise and Consent in 1962 - that long ago.

It's about the use and abuse - mainly abuse - of power on Capitol Hill and Pennsylvania Avenue. It even beats the nearest fictional contenders, the TV serials Washington Behind Closed Doors and West Wing, for cliffhanging suspense, brazen knavery, cynical manipulation, heartless blackmail and satisfying comeuppance.

Jeff Bridges hasn't had as good a role in ages as that of a Clintonesque US President who's in his expiring months of office and wants to be remembered for one audacious "first" - so when the vice-presidential office falls vacant through death he nominates a woman (Joan Allen). But her confirmation gets unexpectedly snared in a sex scandal dating from her college days. And a purer-than-Puritan senator (Gary Oldman, thinner than Charles Laughton in Advise and Consent, but just as juicily wicked) goes gunning for the wench when her appointment comes up for congressional approval.

That's all you need to know (or should know). For the ins and outs of the plot are delicious, unpredictable to the last vote and, even then, not spoiled by a "surprise" revelation that's set up shamelessly to resolve the drama, but actually pulls the political rug out from under it. By then, though, it's too late to spoil anything. It has a hugely colourful cast of characters: White House staffers who would cut throats for their boss; politicos on the make, who quake should their own skulduggery be exposed; FBI operatives teasing out past peccadillos for future arm-twisting; horse traders, bag carriers and spin doctors galore. Issues galore, too: women in politics, privacy, abortion, press freedom and licence.

The great trick Rod Lurie works is making character drive events, thus lending a human dynamic to plot machinations. Each of the principals is a study in, well, principles (or the lack of them). Bridges has most fun as a president whose ends are as sleazy as his means, but can be sanctified by presentation. Turning the screw on a minor but troublesome congressman who demurs when offered a shark sandwich in the Oval Office - the chief executive's gourmet appetite is a running joke - Bridges makes even the most anodyne comment resonate like a death sentence: "You refuse to break bread with your president?" And his last speech to Congress is a model of Clinton-esque duplicity, sounding statesmanlike, but self-serving to the last syllable.

Joan Allen, one of the screen's most intelligent actresses, stands up for herself like a stubborn Lady Liberty, a public monument refusing to step down off the plinth of her private life and fight her adversaries in the muck. And Oldman's malicious senator is among the best things he's done in a long career spent enriching US films with chameleon roles. A politician whose personal life is a vacuum, Oldman projects the dangerous ability of power and arrogance to fill the void in the places where the republic's business is conducted. He would set even Charles Laughton applauding. Don't miss.

The Contender
Cert: 15

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