The Contender
Rod Lurie (2000)
Democrat US President Jackson Evans (Jeff Bridges) is close to completing his second four-year term. His Vice-President, Troy Ellard, dies suddenly; Evans nominates Ohio Senator Laine Hanson (Joan Allen) to succeed Ellard. In describing Hanson’s rocky road to confirmation as Veep, the writer-director Rod Lurie combines political chicanery drama with, eventually, pious hope for the new millennium. The Contender can hardly fail to seem antiquated now: truth has gotten much stranger than fiction in American politics in the decades since it was made. The fact that the current Vice-President really is female is the least of the movie’s problems on a viewing today. The Contender was first released a couple of weeks before a US presidential election whose resolution was as dramatic, and perhaps as dodgy, as anything that happens in the film. The Florida recount shenanigans in late 2000 were hearteningly eclipsed, eight years later, by the straightforward election of an African-American President. And then there’s Trump. His baleful impact has mired much of American politics in you-couldn’t-make-it-up land for the foreseeable future. (Writing on the subject in the TLS the other week, Ferdinand Mount noted that ‘We have miles to go before we sleep’.) The nefarious behaviour that Rod Lurie puts on screen is paltry in comparison.
The Contender (which I first saw in 2001 or thereabouts) is still entertaining, though, and Lurie gives his story sustained momentum. The President’s nomination of Senator Hanson takes Washington DC by surprise. The favourite to succeed Ellard is Jack Hathaway (William Petersen), Governor of Virginia, who’s become a national hero just at the right time. When a car crashes into the lake where he’s fishing, Hathaway fearlessly dives in to try and save the driver trapped in her vehicle. The attempt fails but does wonders for Hathaway’s poll ratings. He seems a decent chap: although acutely disappointed not to be nominated, he takes the President’s decision on the chin. According to the 25th Amendment, Laine Hanson’s name requires the approval of both houses of Congress. The process is led by a bipartisan advise-and-content committee chaired by Republican Congressman Shelly Runyon (Gary Oldman), who’s vehemently opposed to Hanson. (Despite their different party allegiances, Runyon’s also an old friend of Hathaway’s and thinks him well qualified to be Vice-President.) He turns up an incident from Hanson’s student days, with photographs that purport to show her engaged in drunken sex as part of a sorority initiation. When Runyon raises this in the confirmation hearings, Hanson simply refuses to discuss the matter: in her view, her personal past is no one else’s business. The photos of the ‘orgy’, supposedly featuring a naked Hanson, circulate in the media. The scandal escalates. Jackson Evans looks set to change his mind and put forward Jack Hathaway after all …
Rod Lurie gives his actors plenty of juicy dialogue and is rewarded with some good performances. Joan Allen is excellent. Her Laine Hanson is the embodiment of bland competence and a lightning-quick brain. The difference in how she comes over on and off (a TV) camera seems exactly right. Jeff Bridges’s playing is broader but enjoyable. Not everyone fares so well. Sam Elliott overplays the White House Chief of Staff (it doesn’t help that the character’s forename is Kermit). Supporting Runyon in his opposition to Hanson’s nomination is a fresh-faced, idealistic young Democrat Representative – an idea rather than a person who, in Christian Slater’s hands, stays that way. The political wives in the set-up (who don’t include a First Lady) have very minor roles: it’s not surprising the actresses playing Mrs Hathaway and Mrs Runyon – Kristen Shaw and Irene Ziegler respectively – grab their limited opportunities too eagerly. But Gary Oldman makes up for a lot. He gets right inside Shelly Runyon, a rat-like but seemingly sincere reactionary. It’s one of Oldman’s finest pieces of screen acting.
Engaging as The Contender is, it’s full of unconvincing or puzzling things (including the title, which suggests someone entering a competition: why not ‘The Nominee’?) It’s important that Jackson Evans is nearing the end of his second term – appointing a glass-ceiling-breaking woman Vice-President will be his ‘swan song’ – but there’s never a word about who’s in the running to succeed him in the White House. The film appears to be set in a fictional present day; as the smart, affable, opportunist President, Jeff Bridges channels Bill Clinton (the actual President, nearing the end of his eighth year in the job, when The Contender came out) to the hilt. It’s therefore confusing to hear that Senator Hanson voted ‘to impeach President Clinton’. She did so as a Republican, which raises a larger issue. Runyon’s animus towards her is partly to do with his loathing of affirmative action and abortion rights but also because he sees Hanson as a turncoat. It’s unclear what purpose Lurie means her recent conversion to serve and his script ignores how it sits with her Democrat colleagues or is reflected in poll ratings. Her switch of party just seems to muddy the water.
Lurie also makes Hanson an upfront atheist without acknowledging the major implications of that in the electoral world of America. There’ve been US Presidents and Vice-Presidents accused by political rivals of irreligion, others whose claims to be Christian were dubious, to say the least, but none was a card-carrying unbeliever. Lurie presents his heroine’s atheism as part of her modernity but it doesn’t make sense – especially in view of how often The Contender mentions what ‘the American people’ want, can stomach, and so on. No less implausible is that Hanson’s nomination isn’t immediately doomed when the accusations and photos come to light. The film’s story is premised on misogynist prejudice: the protagonist’s contention, which Rod Lurie appears to share, is that a male politician’s indiscretions wouldn’t be held against him. Maybe that’s why Bill Clinton is mentioned by name (there’s nothing about Jackson Evans’s sex life) – as a reminder that he survived as President despite Monica Lewinsky and, before that, as leader in the race for the Democrat presidential nomination in 1992 despite Gennifer Flowers. It’s hardly the case that these scandals weren’t big news, though, and Clinton, at the time, seemed unusually lucky not to be sunk by them. Gary Hart, his predecessor as Democrat front runner only five years earlier, might not agree that the media and voters weren’t bothered about his extra-marital activities. Be that as it may, The Contender argues that there’s one law for men and another for women in American politics. So how does Laine Hanson have a hope of surviving?
None of this might matter as much if The Contender was a mocking hatchet job. In that case, you might be more prepared to accept realism as subordinate to satirical imperative. For a while, the film seems as if it could be heading in this direction; even well into the story, there are cynical highlights. The revelation that the lake incident was a put-up job – Jack Hathaway paid the woman in the car to drive off the bridge (though she wasn’t supposed to drown) – has cynical force, along with the President’s relish in announcing this at a meeting to which he has summoned Hathaway, Runyon and Hanson. But Rod Lurie changes tack almost laughably in the closing stages. Early on, I took the familiar, vaguely heroic phrases in Larry Groupé’s score to be ironic; at the climax, it was clear they were meant to be taken straight. Jackson Evans refuses to accept Laine Hanson’s request that he withdraw her nomination. His amusing pragmatism lurches into sanctimony as he addresses Congress and Shelly Runyon in particular. ‘It pains my soul,’ he informs Runyon, ‘to tell you that you have brought blood and shame under this great dome’. Vanquished vermin Runyon tries to skulk out of the chamber but Evans continues:
‘… you may walk out on me, you may walk out on this body but you cannot walk out on the will of the American people. Americans are a good people, they’re a just people, Mr Runyon, and they will forgive you, but they will not forget. Hate and ego have no place residing in what my good friend Laine Hanson calls the chapel of democracy.’
It sounds bogus but isn’t meant to be. Larry Groupé’s triumphal music swells. The Contender carries a closing dedication ‘For our Daughters’.
4 November 2022