Jessica Chastain is at her very best in _Miss Sloane_.
She is at full throttle, 100-miles-per-hour, from the
get go. The performance rivals her work in _The Tree
of Life_ and _Miss Julie_, although those are very
different films with very different protagonists.
Perhaps the closest comparison would be Maya in _Zero
Dark Thirty_, another win-at-all-cost workaholic.
In interviews, Chastain revealed that she originally
envisioned a poorly dressed, sleep-deprived obsessive
lobbyist for the titular character Elizabeth Sloane
-- kind of like her character in Bigelow's film.
After doing research and meeting with real life
Washington D.C. lobbyists, she radically revised
her ideas, armoring Sloane in black power suits and
matching nail polish. Instead of the emotional eternal
graduate student in _Zero_, her Miss Sloane is a
staggering powerful grown woman. She is brilliant,
ambitious, and not above betraying her coworkers.
Commanding without being loud most of the time, the
actress brings astonishing nuances to bear (witness
the 4-5 different ways she evokes the fifth amendment
against self-incrimination, and the electric, montage-like
sketches showing Sloane dazzling and schmoozing with her
assets at fund-raising parties). The directorial and
cinematography work by John Madden and Sebastian
Blenkov, respectively, emphasize her larger than
life stature. There are two wide-angle shots -- one
at the airport when she regrets almost getting
a coworker killed, the other at the end when she
walks out of prison -- where the camera reveals just
how small and fragile she can be without that titanic
persona. (Chastain is barely 5'4" after all.) The
exceptions only underscore the rule: at most times
she seems to be the only entity on screen.

And yet Chastain will probably come away without
even an Oscar nomination this year. The Oscars
seldom reward career women (for Best Actress, the
last 30 years have produced two detectives, in
_Silence of the Lambs_ and _Fargo_) or rogues
(_Monster_ and _Misery_). Actors are different
of course. The sheer velocity and ferocity of
her Sloane are technical marvels to pull off,
but these don't please crowds; Holly Hunter
didn't win for _Broadcast News_ either. Many
award winning performances can be preening,
self-congratulatory exercises. Nicole Kidman
seemed to think that good acting equals speaking
her lines *really* slowly in _The Hours_. That
and a fake nose. The Academy voters apparently
agreed! Take any random 20-minute chunk of _Miss
Sloane_, nd I'm not sure the sheer power and variety
of Chastain's performance in those 20 minutes
would not have obliterated many award-winning
actresses' entire careers.

Back to the rest of the film. Gugu Mbatha-Raw
(who starred in _Belle_) is a cool, principled
counter-eight to Sloane's fireball, while Alison Pill
teams up with her "Newsroom" costar Sam Waterston
as the opposition. The reviewers who claim the
over-the-top ending is passe in this political
climate must be jaded beyond words; political
corruption is still punishable by imprisonment
in this country. The excesses and sensationalism
of the story's final act are easy to forgive
because of the grace note at the very end. Elizabeth
Sloane remains an enigma, the reason for the fanatical
dedication to her cause never revealed. The film
is much better this way.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

The legislation Sloane pushes through in the film is
about gun control and background checks. A better
screenplay would have focused on military grade automatic
weapons with rapid rates of fire used in massacres.
Not much is known about Sloane's past, although
her exchange with the sympathetic gigolo reveals a
checkered upbringing. She is clearly a free-market
advocate, and hangs pictures of Ronald Reagan and
George W. Bush in her office. Perhaps the former
gives a rationale for her stance on gun control.
Reagan, after all, was the target of gun violence.
A secret service agent (Brady) was paralyzed after
taking a bullet for him.

In an on-air debate, Sloane compares gun control to
having a driver's license, and guns to thousand-pound
metals-with-engines. Both self-evidently need to be
regulated. The script could have gone much farther.
Turn on the news and you find that the militias of
today have AK47 and rocket propelled grenade (RPG)
launchers as their favorite weapons. Would owning
RPGs then be an inalienable right to "bearing arms"?
Where is the national RPG association? What about M1
Abram tanks, tactical nukes, and chem/bio weapons while
we are at it? Aren't those weapons of war? Fortunately
they are not just "regulated," but banned from the public
outright.

Needless to say, it is intellectually fraudulent
for the National Rifle Association to wrap itself
around the 2nd amendment -- about "bearing arms" to
maintain "a well-regulated militia." "Arms" were
weapons of war -- muskets, bayonets, cannons -- during
the American Revolutionary War. Nowhere are "guns"
mentioned in the amendment, much less "rifles." The
reason, of course, is that in 1791, there were hardly
any rifles used in battles. 24 years later, on the
pivotal battlefield of Waterloo featuring the most
technologically advanced nations on earth at that
time, no rifle units fought on the French side.
A few English light infantry regiments (e.g., the 95th)
and Prussian Jaeger companies had rifles -- perhaps
5% of the Coalition's forces. Rifles had a much
slower rate of fire than the smooth-bore muskets
commonly used at the time (even the best troops
could barely manage maybe 6 shots per minute with
muskets). The rifled gun barrel had better accuracy
at longer range (> 100 yards), but once the firing
started, the black smoke from the gunpowder used
at the time made it hard to see beyond that range.
Needless to say, automatic assault rifles
did not exist back then. I'm sure no one would
object to a National Musket Association championing
19th century, unconcealable weapons that are useless
for massacres in school and movie theaters.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)