Her personal life is nonexistent. She pops pills in secret, presumably speed since she never sleeps. She is awkward in everyday human interaction. Her friendship with underling Esme Manucharian (an excellent Gugu Mbatha-Raw) has a disturbing power-imbalance from the start. There are many shots (too many) of people turning to one another with expressions of, "Is this lady for real?" We get the point: she's outside-of-the-box, she's brilliant, she's scary. At one point, Schmidt—who poached her from her old firm—asks her point-blank: "Were you ever normal? What were you like as a child?"
The action switches back and forth between Senate hearings investigating Miss Sloane's unorthodox and perhaps illegal dealings and the events that led her to that point. Perera's awkward script makes it abundantly clear just how difficult it is to pull off Aaron Sorkin-esque dialogue, the rat-a-tat-tat of "The West Wing" or "The Social Network," featuring people wholly fluent in complex "insider" language. It's challenging to write and it's challenging for actors to deliver. The dialogue in "Miss Sloane" is stilted in the extreme ("My bank account and liberal conscience won't justify owning a car"), in particular in the group scenes, where the "banter" never lifts off the page.
Chastain is a naturally emotional actress: in her nearly-wordless performance in "The Tree of Life" she is so alive onscreen you can practically see the pulse beating in her wrists. Miss Sloane is not that kind of character. Chastain is a pleasure to look at, in her dizzyingly high heels, ice-white skin and bright red lips. Madden and cinematographer Sebastian Blenkov—fresh off of "Men & Chicken"—do right by their star, lighting her and framing her in the most dramatic way possible, reveling in her coloring, her striking silhouette, getting as close as possible to her to examine the flashes of expression in this strange character's eyes. But she wears the character of Miss Sloane like a costume. There's a flatline quality to Chastain's voice in this role (not heard in her other performances) that makes the dialogue sound even more over-written; there’s no range, no prosody.
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