Opens October 13, 2000

Given the clear exhaustion with which the American public now greets sexual scandal, especially in politics, it seems curious that Hollywood would choose to make a film about the subject. Yet, writer/director Rod Lurie seems to have felt that much needed to be said in this arena and so he has given us The Contender, one of the most blatant examples of liberal pabulum to come down the pike in recent years. With its cut-and-dry politics (Republicans bad, Democrats good), this is a film that masquerades as a message movie when it is really little more than an ideological soapbox. A deathly slow soap box to boot. It moves with all the excitement of C-SPAN.

The story here is slight at best, focusing on the controversial nomination of a woman to the Vice Presidency. When the current Vice President dies suddenly, President Jackson Evans (Jeff Bridges) first considers Senator Jack Hathaway (William Peterson) as a replacement. But Hathaway has recently tried and failed to rescue a drowning woman. If poor Jack had rescued the girl that would have been another story, but as it is, he's tainted now, so he's out of the running. The Prez has no choice but to go with spunky Senator Laine Hansen (Joan Allen), a picture-perfect choice.

As it turns out, though, dear Laine isn't as picture perfect as you'd expect and old school Republican Senator Shelly Runyon (Gary Oldman) will stop at nothing to discredit her in the nomination hearings. The contrast between Laine Hansen and Shelly Runyon exposes one of the film's most glaring offenses, that being an extreme liberal bent that permeates the story. In his indictment of the witch hunt policies of the mostly Republican committee interrogating Hansen, Lurie creates his own witch hunt skewering an entire political party in the process.

And then there's the sex issue, which is neither as sensational nor as sexy as you might expect or hope. Echoing the feeding frenzy of the Lewinsky affair, the film attempts to spin a sordid tale about Laine's collegiate sex-scapades and, in the process, force us to ask what is public and what is private, as well as whether we live in a world of double standards. Unfortunately, what should be a complex exploration of Washington hypocrisy, quickly becomes little more than a platform for generalized political witticisms -- "they are paid to teach, not to preach" -- and soap box digressions. The idea of female empowerment, so clear in the beginning of the film, gets lost in the political muckraking that takes over.

Most of Lurie's mistakes start and end with his heroine. While Joan Allen brings enormous warmth and strength to her portrayal, she is still saddled with towing a party line. In the process, she is more a figurehead than a person. Further, many of the story choices betray Laine's character and the script's essence. While Lurie claims that a woman can hold her own in politics and should be valued the same as a man, in the end, she is rescued not by her own actions, but by those of the President, who is, of course, a man. Further, her staunch refusal to admit whether she did or did not commit these sexual acts is countermanded by a less-than-dramatic third act confession of sorts. It seems that, even if a character pleads privacy, Hollywood dictates otherwise. The audience (not the committee) deserves all the salacious details.

Politics aside, Lurie simply writes and directs a bad movie. His plotting is plodding, his character relationships are flimsy at best and the supposedly complex moral atmosphere falls flat. Had this been the pilot for The West Wing, the series would have been vetoed.