I have often wondered why the average Chilean peasant demonstrates a more accurate understanding of American political parties than the average American citizen. I suspect it is because the average Chilean peasant is too busy to watch films like The Contender.
We Americans, on the other hand, seem to have an infinite amount of time for such drivel. We watch one Hollywood release after another--all of them consisting of the most inconceivably wrongheaded portrayals of politicians. Republicans are invariably evil because of their own narrow-minded agendas. Democrats are evil because of their personal ambitions. The only evil politician we're sure never to encounter in a Hollywood portrayal of Capitol Hill is some self-serving jerk who is out to secure more federal funding for his district. Hmmm . . . I guess that must be because there's no such person.
We Americans are committed to perhaps the most fatuous collective fantasy in history: the idea that our politicians, when they are evil, are ideologically motivated to be evil. They do evil things because they want to go down in history as great leaders. They do evil things because their commitment to individual liberty has blinded them to compassion. They quote statesmen to one another constantly, studding their conversations with little gems of wisdom from Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon. They never argue about money, only justice. It's the cutest little fantasy you ever saw. And we've seen it more times than I can count on the fingers of one hundred senators.
Why do Hollywood executives make films like The Contender? Because they think we're idiots. And why do we flock to see such films?
The answer rather speaks for itself, doesn't it?
Sometime before The Contender begins, the vice-president has died. A Democratic governor eager to be appointed to the dead man's position conveniently finds himself in a fishing boat with a reporter when a car flies off the bridge over their boat and plunges into the water beside them. Because the woman trapped in the car is an average American, she is too stupid to examine the interior of her car for an air pocket. She remains in her seat and drowns.
And because the audience is an average American audience, we are too stupid to be annoyed by the fact that we know, not two minutes into the film, that the governor who dove into the water to save the woman in the car had some kind of advance knowledge that she would be plunging her vehicle into the water beside his boat. And instead of considering what other, better things we might be able do with our time, we remain seated and proceed to drown in the overwhelming stupidity of yet another Hollywood film about presidential politics.
President Jackson Evans (Jeff Bridges) has decided what his great legacy to history will be: He will appoint a female senator named Laine Hanson (Joan Allen) to the vice-presidency. We've had women as governors, women in congress, and women appointed to the supreme court. But we've never had a woman in either of the two executive positions of our government.
The movie doesn't want to outrage us with the notion of a woman president. It isn't even willing to go so far as to suggest that we might actually elect a woman to the position of vice-president. The only thing imaginable to any collective consciousness as flaccid as ours is the idea of a woman being appointed to the vice-presidency.
Hoorah for feminism!
Led by the obligatorily small, balding, evil, bespectacled weasel named Shelly Runyon (Gary Oldman), the Republicans move to block Hanson's appointment as vice-president. There's a lot of heart-sinkingly superficial blabber about 'greatness' and 'history.' In a truly insipid speech that Runyon miraculously delivers to Hanson without prompting her to vomit, he names two presidents that he considers great: Lincoln (a Republican) and Kennedy (a Democrat). I'm no scholar of American history, but it seems to me that the only thing about Kennedy that an ardent Republican would be able to categorize as great would be his inability to duck under fire.
Because Maggie Thatcher was such a nasty evil conservative woman, Hanson refuses to compare herself to the former British Prime Minister. When pressed for an example of a vice-president from history after whom she might want to pattern herself, she replies, "Thomas Jefferson."
Again, I'm no scholar of American history. But I fail to see any similarity at all between being appointed to the vice-presidency by a man who is championing your cause and being named vice-president because you lost the presidential election to your hated opponent John Adams. In order for Hanson to behave toward Jackson Evans the way that Jefferson behaved toward John Adams, she would have to leak stories to reporters on her own private payroll about what a rotten job Evans was doing.
But what we Americans like is the idea of a vice-president who is at least able to produce the name of another vice-president. We're less interested in an understanding of history than in providing ourselves with the illusion that our elected officials understand something about it. If we wanted to check on them, we would have to do some reading. But we, as a society, have decided to wait for the movie instead.
Senator Hanson has a few skeletons in her closet--all of them sexual. Since sex is a pretty fleshy sort of an activity, perhaps my use of 'skeletons' is inept. But if inept metaphors bother you, then you knew to stay away from this film before you ever came to my review. A contender, after all, is most famously what Marlon Brando could have been in a great film (On the Waterfront) that tried to examine the issue of unionization. The Contender, by contrast, only gives us candidates who are either more or less willing to make themselves into the issues.
Even Senator Hanson's refusal to be baited into a discussion of her sexual past is the film's way of making Hanson into the issue. The point of The Contender is not that women should be as free as men are to seek sexual gratification with multiple partners. The point, regrettably, is that Senator Hanson never participated in the orgy that her Republican detractors say she participated in.
The Contender tells us that we must dispense with the double standard that we impose on women, but lacks the courage to dispense with that standard even in the relatively safe confines of the fictional world that constitutes the film.
Writer/director Rod Lurie's decision to show us that Hanson's accusers are just plain wrong is a monumentally offensive failure of nerve. It's not enough that we refuse to consider a woman for the presidency in real life. We can't even consider a sexually adventuresome female vice-president in a movie about a sexually adventuresome vice-president.
Apart from its simplistic-yet-contradictory message, its historically insensitive dialogue, and its reliance on all of the cliches that I suppose we've actually come to look forward to in political films, The Contender features a number of actors who never once burst into laughter at the incredibly stupid things that come out of their mouths. Oscars all around, I say.
In THE CONTENDER the sudden death of the vice president of the United States forces U.S. president Jackson Evans Jeff Bridges to pick a replacement. H...More at Family Video
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