Filibluster

By RICHARD CORLISS

Another confession: liberal movie critics tend to be critical of liberal movies. We're more susceptible to the red meat of an old Clint Eastwood actioner than to the good intentions of a warm-'n'-fuzzy plea for brother- and sisterhood. It's not the politics that rankles so much as the piety. That's where The Contender, Rod Lurie's new Washington drama, stumbles. It has surface smarts but a soft head. Billy Elliot appeals to liberal emotions, The Contender to liberal righteousness.

The Vice President has suddenly died, and President Jackson Evans (Jeff Bridges) needs a replacement. Surprise: he wants a woman, Senator Laine Hanson (Joan Allen). She's flinty, principled and perhaps fatally compromised by allegations that she participated in an orgy in her college days. If she is ratified, it will be over the sternest objections of Representative Shelly Runyon (Gary Oldman, sporting a cornpone accent and the most preposterously wayward Capitol Hill hairdo since Everett Dirksen's). "We're both sticking to our guns," Runyon warns Evans. "The difference is, mine are loaded." He is determined to corner Hanson with the question she refuses to answer: Are you now, or have you ever been, a slut?

The writer-director, son of political cartoonist Ranan Lurie, lets his large, attractive cast display varieties of charisma and chicanery for an hour or so. Then he has everyone make speeches; it's as though a TV remote control had switched from The West Wing to the Lieberman-Cheney debate. All drama, not to mention insider dish, gets lost in the wind tunnel. By the end, The Contender is as edifying and stultifying as--what would the real-life equivalent be?--a Ralph Nader presidency.

--R.C.