Washington Post: ‘Miss Sloane’ Shows What Happens When Hollywood Abandons Political Common Sense
When it comes to gun rights, Hollywood seems to jump the shark over and over again…
Via Washington Post:
Consider “Miss Sloane,” expanding to 1,600 theaters this weekend. Jessica Chastain, turning in an impressively intense, awards-caliber performance, stars as a hard-driving lobbyist — a best-in-the-biz type — who bails from a conservative lobbying shop in order to join a PR firm backing the Brady Campaign in its efforts to pass a universal background check bill. What follows is a twisty political thriller that has all the sophistication of a mediocre hour of “Scandal.”
There are little things that feel wrong in the movie — a PAC that raises just $15 million from three million donors, for instance, suggesting an average giving rate of five dollars per donor — as well as one big thing. The massive new background check law that forms the heart of “Miss Sloane’s” conflict is, simply, an absurdity. It is pitched as the sort of law that would “close loopholes” and stop mass shootings, despite the fact that background check laws have been unable to stop recent killings and proposed expansions of background checks would have done nothing to stop them. I found it hard to care about the machinations surrounding the bill since no one really addresses the fact that the bill itself is an empty nothing…
…“We didn’t offer the script to the Brady Campaign, we didn’t offer the script to any Second Amendment groups,” director John Madden said when I asked if he had consulted with the NRA or other gun rights groups when making the film. “We didn’t want the film being adopted by one side or the other of the argument, because it isn’t a polemic. … I don’t think — the film is not political in its intent. It’s political in its milieu and it’s political in its, you know, the background of the story. But it’s more about political process to me.”
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