Film Review: ‘Miss Sloane’ Thrills Politically, But Drags Narratively

CHICAGO – Nothing says the holiday season like a film about lobbying and politics. If you read that sarcastically, you’d be wrong. “Miss Sloane” offers a female spin for an otherwise male-dominated political landscape. Most of you are trying to tune out politics after the elections, but this film builds off of that momentum by reminding us how we arrived to that point.

Rating: 3.5/5.0

In all these films about politics, rarely do we encounter such intellectually aggressive character as Elizabeth Sloane. She is a chameleon of a character that is always the epitome of style and sophistication but can change her personality when it suits her end goal. Director John Madden tries to keep up by attempting to introduce Hitchcockian thriller elements and emotional, moral out-pours in the vein of a Sidney Lumet film, but ultimately falls plainly into a political film limbo that inhabited by all of the mid-grade political films that have come out. Madden tries to create a shroud of mystery around the character by focusing on visual misdirection and political theater, but the only person he seems to have fooled is himself. The predictability of his techniques coupled with the story makes it all less than effective. The good thing is that Chastain stands out stylistically enough to keep your attention and detract some of it off the technical slump the film falls into.

The most blatant problem with “Miss Sloane” is that it feels like it was written by a man. First-time screenplay Jonathan Perera creates this story but seems to take too many elements from past political films, usually with male leads. This leads to creating a fairly predictable story where the misdirection is obvious and the red herrings are personified by a redhead. In these types of films, the male lead is usually a womanizing alcoholic with a god complex and an ego as big as their presumably large penis.They tend to be morally gray, willing to sell out their own family if it means winning. Aside from switching the genders, Perera gives Sloane a prescription pill problem over alcohol, a prostitute who he tries to force into the position of love interest even though he is so shallowly developed, and commits one of the worst errors in judgment by falling into several female-centered tropes, like that of the emotional female.