OxfordPress.com

Grade: B

Verdict: Definitely worth your box office vote.

Details: Starring Joan Allen, Gary Oldman and Jeff Bridges. Directed by Rod Lurie. Rated R for profanity and sexuality. Two hours, 6 minutes.

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Review: The politics in the sleek new drama, "The Contender," aren't just down and dirty. At times, they're downright filthy as such private matters as birth control and what you did sexually in college become matters of public debate.

The situation is this: the vice president has died and the president (Jeff Bridges), a two-term Democratic lame duck, wants his replacement to be viewed as a legacy - his administration's "swan song" says one top aide (gravel-voiced Sam Elliott.) To that end, he nominates a liberal senator named Laine Hanson, who happens to be a she.

Her gender aside, Hanson (Joan Allen) would seem to be an unassailable candidate. Not so, says Shelly Runyon (Gary Oldman), the Republican senator heading the confirmation committee. Privately, he prefers one of the president's last-minute rejects - the governor (William Petersen) from Virginia. More to the point, he quite rightly refuses to vote for a woman just because she is a woman.

Conveniently, just in time for the hearings, a tasty bit of scandal rears its head. Seems that when the senator was in college, she was a real party girl. There's a video floating around the Internet that apparently shows her having a good time with an entire fraternity.

But when asked about the veracity of the tape, she takes the high road. Such questions aren't pertinent to her qualifications. Maintaining a stoic (albeit impeccably dressed) silence, she insists, "If I answer the questions, it means it was OK to ask them."

Shades of the McCarthy era. Or of "The Crucible" in which Daniel Day-Lewis took a similar stand while Allen, as his steadfast wife, nabbed an Oscar nomination.

Actually, she has two nominations - for "The Crucible" and for playing Pat Nixon in "Nixon." Reportedly, her work in these roles inspired writer/director Rod Lurie to create "The Contender" just for her. You can certainly see why. Allen has a fine-boned purity that's imbues her characters with an unexpected resilience. No matter what the mess may be - witchcraft, Watergate or a political sex scandal - she seems fully capable of staring down her accusers. She may not always win, but, rightly or wrongly, she never flinches.

That tension serves her well here. Alas, it doesn't leave her much latitude for personal touches. Senator Hanson is a curiously remote figure, buried in her noble silence despite Allen's best efforts to humanize her. The result is that she has to watch while her co-stars pretty much steal her movie.

Bridges starts out slightly overacting a slightly buffoonish president, but the script slowly slants his way. For all his talk about shark sandwiches and bowling, he's revealed as a canny manipulator whose affable manner disguises a will of steel.

Even more striking is Oldman, a practiced movie thief who often steals films not worth taking ("Lost in Space," anyone?). Hiding behind a bald spot, bad hair and nerd glasses (which, in a nice touch of character vanity, he exchanges for sexier specs when it's time to conduct the hearings), Oldman gives us a man whose morals have obscured rather than sharpened his vision. He's absolutely right not to give Hanson a pass just because of her gender. Yet his attacks on her grow more gender-based by the day. He pulls everything from insinuating that a pregnant VP could mean a national catastrophe to "accidentally" addressing her as "sir," then quickly amending it to "madam."

"The Contender" doesn't get everything right. Lurie can't resist cue-ing the "we the people" music when Allen or Bridges make an important speech. And a crucial plot twist concerning Petersen's governor is, perhaps, too easy to guess.

But on the whole, "The Contender" zips along with the pleasurable bustle of dire doings in the plush corridors of political power. It's a vivid, juicy, thoroughly entertaining movie - one of those pictures in which winning or losing takes a back seat to playing the game.

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, Cox News Service