Miss Sloane Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.0
Overall		4.0

Miss Sloane Blu-ray Movie Review

Let's all go to the lobbyist.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman April 1, 2017

Miss Sloane begins with one of those monologues delivered directly to the camera that more or less lets the cat out of the bag from the get go, not only detailing what the titular Elizabeth Sloane (Jessica Chastain) thinks of her job as a high powered lobbyist, but also that she’s no fool and always comes to a battle prepared to win. That perhaps undercuts some of the putative suspense when it’s detailed that Miss Sloane (is that “miss” some kind of throwback, or do women no longer care about such things?) is in hot water with a Senate committee investigating her activities, and that she is in fact about to testify before imperious Senator Ronald Sperling (John Lithgow). She’s been well rehearsed by her attorney Daniel Posner (David Wilson Barnes), though her “script” amounts to repeated invocations of her right against self incrimination courtesy of the Fifth Amendment, an early clue that Sloane’s integrity is at the very least questionable. Miss Sloane kind of plays like a John Grisham thriller ported from the world of legal ballistics to the wild and wooly halls of Washington, D.C. lobbying, and perhaps surprisingly, Jonathan Perera’s unapologetically talky (even screed like at times) screenplay manages to work up a rather considerable amount of tension. That said, the film probably tries for an eleventh hour “twist” that many will have seen coming from a long way off and which is arguably a little disingenuous given the moral shades of gray that have been on display up until that point.

What does a lobbyist do, anyway? Miss Sloane may not be an authoritative primer in this regard, and it tends to default to a kind of glamorous Hollywood ambience a lot of the time, something that’s perhaps unavoidable given the charismatic Chastain in the lead role, but there is a bit of “sausage making” on display. The film’s structure cuts back and forth between the contemporary Senate hearing and events that led to it, initially showing Sloane at her job with legendary lobbying firm Cole, Kravitz and Waterman, where she’s trying to finagle a quid pro quo with a legislator to ensure his “proper” vote on a bill she’s playfully calling a “Nutella tax”. As her assistant Jane Molloy (Allison Pill) cautions, Sloane is coming awfully close to breaking the law with her plan to offer the incalcitrant legislator an “educational” trip to an island paradise in return for his vote.

This little imbroglio is in fact what has gotten Sloane into trouble, but kind of weirdly, the film then veers off into what amounts to its real tale of lobbying intrigue, when a factotum of a group that is a thinly veiled reference to the National Rifle Association shows up to recruit Sloane to help “rebrand” gun rights for a female demographic that the guy feels is not being reached out to effectively enough. This leads Sloane to laugh outright at the thought of marketing guns to women, something that pushes her boss George Dupont (Sam Waterston) into near fits of apoplexy, since he’s been trying to wrangle an account with this group for some time. He more or less threatens Sloane with unemployment if she doesn’t agree to help, which ultimately leads to Sloane deciding to take matters into her own hands.

It’s here that Perera’s screenplay might have been more fully developed, for Sloane has been depicted as something of a ruthless career opportunist, out to secure the “win” at any cost, and personal feelings about issues be damned. However, when it comes to gun rights and/or gun control, suddenly Sloane has a conscience and is out to do the “right” thing, albeit often duplicitously and with those aforementioned moral shades of gray. It’s a sometimes discomfiting collision of ideas that Perera doesn’t really adequately address (and there’s even a passing reference by Dupont that Sloane may have been personally affected by gun violence, something else that isn’t really detailed). Nonetheless, the upshot is that Sloane leaves her cushy job to work for a scrappy other player in town, taking several of her coworkers with her.

Without spoiling the twists and turns that Miss Sloane takes, suffice it to say Sloane lobbies rather forcefully for gun control with her new firm, something that doesn’t sit easily with her former employer. A supposed rift with one key personnel member turns out to be something quite different in one of the more predictable elements that the film offers, and in fact the entire wind up, after such a labyrinthine “setting of the table”, is almost patently ridiculous and rote feeling. That said, the film delivers surprising suspense, especially given how relentlessly talky it all is.

The peculiar thing about Sloane as a character is how Perera and director John Madden kind of want to have their cake and eat it, too. Sloane obviously has some moral scruples, as her change of employment proves, but then she does something unconscionable like use the survivor of a horrific mass shooting (an impressive Gugu Mbatha-Raw) as a veritable prop. But then that dalliance with the “dark side” is overturned when even supposed missteps are shown to be part of some kind of master plan that Sloane has had in the making seemingly from even before the film began. Chastain’s intensity helps to overcome some of these hurdles, but the film might have provided a more realistic accounting of a lobbyist by simply having made Sloane an out and out villain.

Miss Sloane Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Miss Sloane is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.39:1. Shot with Arri Alexa XT cameras and finished at a 2K DI, Miss Sloane has a sleek and generally well detailed appearance, though Madden and DP Sebastian Blenkov repeatedly shoot into light sources or otherwise tweak the imagery with variant brightness and contrast, something that can at least minimally affect detail levels (pay attention during the opening monologue for several such moments, where brightness and contrast fluctuate noticeably, seemingly for no "logical" reason in terms of a lighting source). Some of the establishing footage around D.C. doesn't offer quite the same sharpness as the bulk of the presentation, so perhaps some brief stock footage may have been utilized. As tends to be the case with many digitally captured films, the brightly lit scenes offer excellent fine detail levels, while some of the minimally lit interior sequences suffer from minor murk which masks some detail. The palette has not really been toyed with here overly aggressively, though there are a couple of scenes bathed in the ever popular yellow or blue tones. There are no issues with image instability and no compression anomalies.

Miss Sloane Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Miss Sloane's DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track is perfectly competent but doesn't really have a chance to show off overly impressive immersion since so much of the film is simply built out of people talking to each other. Some of the cacophony in the Senate hearing room or a party scene that has a lot of revelers offer a good supply of surround activity, and the rather nice score by Max Richter also gets good placement in the side and rear channels (if you're not familiar with some of his reimaginings of classical pieces, I highly recommend checking him out).

Miss Sloane Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Lobbying: Winning at Any Cost (1080p; 10:53) is standard EPK fare bolstered by some above average interviews.


• Theatrical Trailer (1080p; 1:24)

Miss Sloane Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

It's kind of refreshing to see a "thriller" with a strong female protagonist who is not the traditional model of a damsel in distress. That said, certain motivations of Sloane's character are awfully random, and the denouement of this film is patently ridiculous. However, with very strong performances and a nice breathless pace set by director John Madden, many (maybe even most) viewers will be content to go along for the ride. Technical merits are strong, and Miss Sloane comes Recommended.