Moving target

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This article was published 08/12/2016 (3341 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Ultimately, it was a coincidence that the Washington-set political thriller Miss Sloane happened to shoot in the first months of 2016, the year of the most outrageous U.S. presidential campaign in history.

Miss Sloane is not about those upper echelons of power as much as the soul-crushing grind of the grimy machinery beneath the surface.

The film focuses on fierce, brilliant lobbyist Elizabeth Sloane, played by Jessica Chastain. For mysterious reasons, she quits the most prestigious lobbying firm in Washington to take on what is, in the current American reality, a lost cause: fighting the all-powerful gun lobby to enact sane gun laws.

To realize the script by first-time screenwriter Jonathan Perera, London-based, Cambridge-educated English director John Madden, best known for Shakespeare in Love and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, insisted on casting Chastain in the title role.

Madden, 67, had worked with her on the 2010 remake The Debt, casting her as a Mossad agent, and he knew the material was perfect for her, partly because she has no problem taking of the role of an unlikable person.

“That’s a kind of heresy in the movie world,” Madden acknowledges. “Jessica’s not that kind of actress, though. She’s quite fearless in what she takes on, if she thinks there’s a case to be made in watching that person.

“You could describe the film as someone recovering their humanity, having chosen to bury the most distracting aspects of her humanity, which is getting in the way of doing what she’s doing.

“Anyway, I don’t think audiences require a character to be likable; they require a character to be human,” Madden says.

The window of Chastain’s availability determined the time frame of the movie shoot in the first months of 2016. That just happened to coincide with a divisive political campaign of cataclysmic proportions.

“Often, these projects can sit dormant for two or three years until the right configuration comes together but in this case, it was already together,” Madden says during a phone interview from Vancouver, where the film premiered at the Whistler Film Festival last week.

“We worked on the script for six months and got it to a place where I thought it was buoyant and doing its job properly and then we went to market with it,” Madden says when asked if the real-time political realities compelled a quick turn-around for his political drama.

Madden says there was no rush to make the film, but the post-production process was pushed to get Miss Sloane in theatres before the political process overtook it or made it look less relevant. “And by that I mean the specific issue of gun legislation,” Madden says.

“We assumed that would be a prominent part of the political discourse, wrongly as it turned out,” Madden says. “No policy positions were ever really discussed in the presidential race because it was totally hijacked by the rather vulgar process of mud-slinging and false statements and misinformation and scare tactics.”

The film was mostly shot in Toronto, and while much of the cast is American (including Chastain, Sam Waterston and John Lithgow), the film has a multinational background. The screenwriter and director are Brits and the production money came from France. That may explain the film’s fixation on the ongoing legal battle over firearms, which Madden describes as “baffling.”

“The gun legislation issue is a deeply confounding and incomprehensible one to anyone standing outside of it,” the director says. “The American political process is opaque and confusing in many ways, so it’s quite fascinating.”

While no one could have anticipated the insanity of the U.S. presidential race, the film feels very pertinent in the way it addresses some issues, such as the influence of Big Money, the gender divide in politics, and the all-important placement of “surprises” in a given campaign.

But the out-there reality of the American political year is not necessarily a positive for a film in which the action seems mild by comparison, Madden acknowledges.

“Did we anticipate the movie would come out in such an extraordinary, febrile atmosphere, with the complete upending of everybody’s expectations? No, we didn’t,” he says.

“That’s a resonant irony for a film that itself deals with an upending of political expectations, a film that actually proceeds by surprise coming on top of surprise.

“We’re trying to figure out what landscape it’s actually landing in,” Madden says. “And I still don’t have the correct answer to that.”

 

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing