I’m not sure why The Contender received so much praise. The Contender was marketed as starring Joan Allen in a film about a female potential vice presidential candidate and her struggle to become appointed, but she barely does more than appear in the first hour and only gets shown as a human being with characteristics that you finally discover are likable in the second. During the opening scenes, I wondered if I had started the wrong movie. Was this the sequel to Manhunter, and that was why William Petersen was doing what he was doing?
Basically The Contender wants to have its cake and eat it too. The Contender’s first hour is mainly about the men in power, and she is simply an object being discussed in relationship to them, not as her own person. Even The Contender’s creators decide to first introduce her by having sex on her desk. If I’m being generous, and you lived under a rock, maybe it was an exercise in challenging gender roles-which person is the senator and which wasn’t: the man or the woman, but I know who Joan Allen is and NOT the guy answering the phone, so…… I’m not going to be generous. Even Christian Slater gets a better introduction as a junior congressman than the senior Senator played by Joan Allen, and his character is called a boy. The Contender is just as sexist as the conservatives they ridicule in the film. They see her first as a sex object, the secretary having the tryst with the senator, then a wife, then a mother, then a senator and then a secular Joan of Arc. The Contender sets the audience up by making us think of her as primarily a sexual being then rebukes us for thinking about an absurd scandal that they set up that WOULD have gotten a guy knocked out of the running.
When The Contender finally gives Joan Allen center stage in the second hour, you can almost see that the movie could have been great, but even then, the movie paints her character as ladylike in her ambitions. She is willing to withdraw and is more Bartleby the Scrivener (“It is beneath my dignity”) than the incumbent politician that we briefly see playing hardball with her constituents and Slater. I liked THAT Senator Laine, but she doesn’t appear very often. In the end, a man, the POTUS, played effectively by Jeff Bridges, has to come to her rescue instead of her telling America what she told him, and I’m not talking about what actually happened in the past.
The Contender failed to make real characters. I still don’t understand why Christian Slater’s character was initially against her and willing to join ranks against a fellow party member. Gary Oldman’s character’s motivations are clear as The Contender progresses-Runyon has a long standing rivalry with POTUS, but his character is so visually absurdly the villain that it is ridiculous and possibly part of an offensive racist cinematic tradition. Also why is Runyon’s wife married to him if she can’t stand him? Did she know Senator Laine before? How did she get to Laine’s house without the press knowing about it? The only character that has fun is POTUS, a manipulative bastard who enjoys making his guests and employees feel uncomfortable while pretending to be welcoming and friendly. Even his storyline could have been better. If the whole story was framed as him treating everyone as chess pieces from the start to pulverize his enemy, The Contender would have been a great movie in the ranks of House of Cards, but it doesn’t so it isn’t. Perhaps that is why the FBI portion of The Contender was the most interesting part of the film for me. Joan Allen did a great job. She has to be just innocent enough for you to root for, but sexy and powerful enough to be the cause of such hubbub. She already walked that tightrope in Manhunter, which Petersen starred in, so it doesn’t surprise me that she can do it here.
The Contender wants to be a modern take on A Man for All Seasons, but it just isn’t. The Contender is worth watching if you like the actors in it or if you just want to watch the last hour, but even movie female politicians deserve better treatment than The Contender provides.