October 12–19, 2000

movies

Bone of Contention

HAIL TO THE JEFF: Bridges(center), as President Jackson Evans, announces that he’s selected Joan Allen (left) as his V.P.

Joan Allen, Jeff Bridges and Rod Lurie talk about their button-pushing political thriller.

by Sam Adams

It’s 9 a.m. Toronto time, which means Jeff Bridges should feel like it’s six in the morning. But if the L.A.-to-Toronto time change has had any effect on him, there’s no sign of it. His hair slicked back, Hawaiian shirt open to the sternum, Bridges lies back in his chair, his hands resting between his splayed legs. If this is the real Jeff Bridges, then he’s a lot more like The Dude, the spaced-out stoner he played in The Big Lebowski, than most of the other characters he’s played. So it’s fairly amusing to contemplate that he’s here promoting The Contender, where’s he cast as no less than the President of the United States. When he says he brought "a certain casualness" to the usually granite-jawed presidential stereotype, he’s not kidding.

Bridges’ laid-back but cunning Commander-in-Chief is hardly the only stereotype the film aims to undermine, though. From the very beginning, The Contender takes on politics at the personal level as much as on the level of power plays and backroom dealings. Despite their high office, the film’s characters aren’t stentorian figureheads, but ordinary people of whom great things are demanded.

Chief among them is Ohio Senator Laine Hanson (Joan Allen), who is named as the President’s choice to succeed his recently deceased Vice President. And in an age where "the personal is political" has become all too horribly real, every aspect of Hanson’s life is laid open to public scrutiny. In particular, a scratchy 8mm film surfaces of what’s purported to be an 18-year-old Laine involved in a collegiate gangbang, a sorority initiation rite turned into a public scandal. A professed atheist and a Democratic Senator whose father (Philip Baker Hall) is a Republican governor, it’s clear Hanson doesn’t like having terms dictated to her, and resents the witchhunt led by the opposition Senator Shelly Runyon (Gary Oldman, nearly unrecognizable with his curly locks, receding hairline and wire-rims). But whether she resists because she has something to hide, or simply because — as she says — it shouldn’t matter what she did is a question The Contender deliberately takes its time answering.

From the stories which circulate as we’re waiting for the interviews to start, it’s clear Rod Lurie, who wrote and directed The Contender, has a reputation as something of a provocateur. A former critic for Los Angeles magazine as well as the host of a film-themed radio show, he’s well-known to most of the press types seated around the table, all of whom are familiar with Lurie’s habit of getting himself thrown out of just such round-table interviews. (One anecdote has Lurie asking an actress if she’d neglected to wear a bra in order to favorably influence reviews of her movie.) Lurie obviously knows his reputation precedes him, and enters the room with a sheepish grin on his face. "Hey guys," he smiles, "go easy on me."

Lurie, who turned to feature directing with last year’s Deterrence, clearly likes to push buttons with his films as well: That one involved the first Jewish President and a nuclear standoff with Iraq. But if his approach can be clumsy, Lurie’s thoughts are clear.

"The common denominator of the great women in leadership in the world — Indira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir, Janet Reno, Madeline Albright — is that they’re really dramatically non-sexual," Lurie ventures. "There’s nothing romantic about them whatsoever. I think that our nation [in particular] cannot stomach the notion of a [powerful] woman in sexual terms. When Shelly Runyon goes after Laine Hanson, every question he asks puts sex in the mind of the American people. The whole notion is to put in the mind of the people their leader in bed with somebody." (In the movie, Sam Elliot’s Machiavellian Chief of Staff puts it a little more bluntly: "The American people don’t like to picture their Vice President with a mouthful of cock.")

Given the extremely undignified circumstances Laine Hanson finds herself in, it’s a little disconcerting to hear Lurie talk about how it was Allen’s "natural sense of dignity" that inspired him to write the movie for her. But even without Lance Hanson’s power suits, Allen still exudes the strength of character that all her characters have in common. Still, though she defends the "wife roles" she’s played in movies like The Crucible and Nixon, Allen acknowledges a fundamental difference: "If you had to encapsulate in one sentence what the character is, you’d say she’s married to John Proctor, or she’s Nixon’s wife. But if you have to say something about Laine, you wouldn’t say she’s Will Hanson’s wife. You’d say she’s a Senator from Ohio."

Of course in Hollywood, money still talks louder than gender, and the biggest obstacle Lurie faced in getting the movie made wasn’t selling a story about a female Vice President; it was keeping Allen in the cast. "most of [the studios] were ready to do it," he recalls, "but not with Joan Allen. I’d get the same things from everybody. ‘Oh, she’s a fantastic actress, she’s the best that there is, I think she’s the most underrated actor on the planet. No way we’re going with her.’ They gave me a list of two or three [more commercial] actresses, and the hint was we could expect them to say yes. But I had written it in the voice of Joan Allen, and that was it, man."

In the end, the film was financed independently, and after shopping it to "the minis" (Miramax, Artisan, et al.), Lurie received a surprise phone call from Steven Spielberg which led to the film’s acquisition by DreamWorks. It was, Lurie says, "not the highest offer, but it was the best. It was Spielberg."

Not only that, but Spielberg put DreamWorks’ resources at Lurie’s disposal when he decided he wanted to re-edit the movie, and ended up advising Lurie on several key scenes. "There’s this speech at the end we called the ‘I stand for,’ speech; it’s Laine’s last monologue. At one point there was no music under it, because I wanted to stick with a sort of documentary style. Steven and the DreamWorks executives all wanted there to be music under it, and I said to Steven" — Lurie smiles — "to Mr. Spielberg, ‘You know, my problem with putting music here is instead of being objective, we effectively become endorsers of what she’s saying.’ And he turned to me and said, ‘Don’t you endorse what she’s saying?’ And I said, ‘Absolutely.’ And he goes, ‘Well then endorse it.’ His theory was, and he’s absolutely right, is we make movies to endorse our own personal feelings — I am not in fact a documentary filmmaker, and I have my beliefs, and I’m ready to put them out on the table."