Never A Contender
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Never a Contender Just another liberal movie. BY JOHN PODHORETZ The brilliant British actor Gary Oldman is not only a star of the new political thriller The Contender, but an executive producer....
...Hanson angers the White House chief of staff by refusing to answer questions about the matter...
...I've never seen Hamlet," his wife says...
...This is the movie's rankest absurdity...
...And the actor replies, "It's about this guy Bernardo...
...Later, the president appears before a joint session of Congress, berates Runyon publicly, screams about partisanship and hate, and is greeted with a standing ova-tion—in which join, presumably those Republicans he has accused of "hate...
...A DreamWorks publicist acknowledges that the initial version of The Contender included more material on Oldman's character—but that cut was more than three hours long, while the final version clocks in at a far more reasonable two hours and six minutes...
...The movie concludes with not one but two of those inadvertently hilarious speeches the movies love to put in the mouths of its dream politicians...
...What's it about...
...The adultery took place only seven years before and was mentioned in court papers...
...The Contender could have run ten hours and still Oldman would have been mistaken...
...Oldman's manager, Douglas Urbanski, is another of the movie's producers...
...And they're both outraged by the finished product, which should give you an idea of the meaning-lessness of those endless credits moviegoers are forced to sit through...
...Hanson tells Runyon's committee that she wants to protect government from the depredations of religion, remove all guns from all American homes, but beef up the military to fight terrorism...
...The consistency of its left-wing message is what has outraged Oldman and Urbanski, who say that when The Contender was filmed, it was far more evenhanded...
...tures became its distributor, The Contender was cut by Lurie—following the orders of DreamWorks honchos Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen, all prominent Democrats and Clinton intimates—into a piece of blatant rabble-rousing that casts Old-man's character, Shelly Runyon, as a pure villain in the moustache-twirling tradition of melodrama...
...The vice president has died, and the president (Jeff Bridges) appoints a personable female senator named Laine Hanson (Joan Allen) to the second-highest office in the land...
...Oldman believed Runyon was a hero because he agreed with the character's views and he was playing Runyon...
...But this is a Hollywood fantasy about Washington, and in Hollywood, adultery isn't given a second thought—or even a first thought...
...It's beneath my dignity," she says, and suffers quietly as the public humiliation grows...
...The whole business is reminiscent of the greatest of all acting jokes: An actor is cast in the role of Bernardo, the smallest part in Hamlet...
...Already the movie is on shaky ground, because the House of Representatives has no role in such confirmations...
...There are dozens of comparable inaccuracies in The Contender, and writer-director Rod Lurie makes the mistake of trying to explain them away with incomprehensible expository dialogue...
...There is no way such a liaison would remain secret in the real world, and even in our age of loosened morals no way that it would not be a public scandal...
...But, they insist, after DreamWorks PicA contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, jofen Podhoretz is a columnist for the New York Post...
...Runyon is supplied with photographs of a college orgy in which Hanson supposedly participated twenty-five years earlier, which he leaks to a website modeled on the Drudge Report...
...What we do learn is that she was party to adultery: She embarked on an affair with her future husband while he was still married...
...Oldman thought his character was a tragic hero: a flawed but morally upstanding spokesman for traditional values honestly disgusted by what he believes to be Hanson's libertinism...
...Oldman's anger has caused a stir in Hollywood...
...The idea that a modern Hollywood might give a conservative Republican congressman a fair shake was delusional from the get-go...
...That, too, is portrayed as a noble act: "I plead guilty to falling in love," she says while apologizing for the pain she caused her husband's wife...
...Off-screen, Oldman is a Thatcherite conservative, and in The Contender he plays a conservative congressman who goes to war against a Democratic White House...
...It all gives The Contender, which begins smashingly, a weird and uncertain tone...
...There is nothing even remotely admirable about this man...
...The only coherent element is the movie's ideological slant...
...But Lurie could never have intended anything other than to show Runyon as a monster...
...In the movie we see, however, Runyon is motivated by equal parts spite (he was the Republican presidential candidate defeated by Jeff Bridges), misogyny (he tries to order for Hanson in a Capitol lunchroom), partisan animosity (Hanson changed party affiliation from the GOP), ideological sanctimony (he is a rabid pro-lifer), and personal preference (the other candidate for the vice presidency is his old friend...
...Her refusal to speak about the orgy is portrayed as unyielding principle, especially when we discover that it never happened...
...Hanson, by contrast, is some kind of saint...
...That may be the only valuable lesson taught by The Contender—except, of course, for the lesson we learn almost every time a picture deals with Washington: Stay home...
Vol. 6 • October 2000 • No. 7
