"I was hired to win."
Miss Sloane is a 2016 political thriller film directed by John Madden from a script by Jonathan Perera. The film stars Jessica Chastain as Elizabeth "Liz" Sloane, a cutthroat Washington lobbyist who revels in power and is a functioning paranoid. One day she decides to lobby for universal background checks for firearms, for the challenge it represents. The cast also includes Mark Strong, Gugu Mbatha Raw, Michael Stuhlbarg, Alison Pill, Jake Lacy, John Lithgow, and Sam Waterston.
The film had its world premiere on November 11, 2016 at the AFI Fest, and was subsequently picked up for distribution by EuropaCorp and released in the United States on November 25, 2016 and in France on March 8, 2017.
Miss Sloane provides examples of:
- Anti-Hero: Sloane. She does several questionable things throughout the film, but it's clear she does it for "the greater good". Whatever that is.
- Artistic License – Law: The movie was criticized for getting a number of important and highly polarizing issues about gun law in the United States wrong.
- Sloane claims in one scene that anybody can buy an assault rifle in cash without identification. Assault rifles are a legally-defined term and are in fact a mutually exclusive category with assault weapons, which are common civilian weapons in the United States.
- Sloane makes a reference to gun shows being a place for "any headcase, felon, or terrorist" to buy guns without identification, but gun shows follow the same laws for transfer as any other location; licensed gun dealers must perform a background check even at gun shows.
- Sloane refers to guns being for sale anonymously on the Internet; guns bought online legally must be shipped to a licensed firearms dealer, and a background check is done by the dealer as part of the legal transaction. Of course, the black market is in existence on the Internet, rendering anonymized purchases of weaponry online a possibility both in film and in real life (though the point is they're not legal as she claims).
- Author Tract: John Madden, the director, has made many statements about gun control in the past, and openly stated in interview that he hoped this film would change some people's minds.
- Bad Guys Play Pool: Connors plays pool with a congressman before threatening his son's political career. It may also be an Actor Allusion to how Michael Stuhlbarg played pool on Boardwalk Empire.
- "Blackmail" Is Such an Ugly Word: Schmidt refuses to allow Sloane to use two surveilance experts, as he doesn't want to use blackmail to get the bill passed. It turns out, Sloane doesn't blackmail anyone. She announces the internet address to show footage of Dupont bribing Senator Sperling.
- Captain Crash: Sloane doesn't have a driver's license. She confesses to Esme Manucharian that she was terrible during her driving exams and that it was the only exams she ever failed.
- Characters as Device: It is never established why any sane person would suddenly join the bandwagon of gun control without any backstory, especially to the point of getting emotional in a courtroom. The person who had a legitimate reason to be this upset didn't even do so. We get almost nothing about why Sloane is interested in this besides "it's a challenge." For that matter, the scene where everyone who has been a loyal worker in a lobbying company suddenly defects and joins her company except for Jane who only does so, not for legitimate reasons but to become a Fake Defector. In other words, almost all of the characters act not because of known motivations but because plot demands it.
- Chekhov's Gun: The eavesdropping experts who work for Sloane.
- The Chessmaster: Sloane reveals herself to be one, with the finale implying that she even instigated the hearings, and her own imprisonment, to get the bill through Congress.
- Covert Pervert: Sloane. She has sex quite a bit, and people seem surprised to hear that.
- Cryptic Background Reference: Sloane gives a few to Ford: only her mother calls her by her first name and she's been "lying her whole life".
- Dark and Troubled Past: Esme survived a mass shooting in high school hiding in the janitor's closet. As a result, she's become a gun control supporter who works at the Brady Campaign, but doesn't reveal this since people say her advocacy has been emotionally motivated. Sloane later reveals this publicly without asking, driving Esme to tears and outraging her, though she goes with it anyway afterward becoming the face of their support for a bill that would mandate guns have universal background checks.
- Engineered Public Confession: Sloane's eavesdropping experts recorded and filmed the private meeting between Senator Sterling and Dupont. Sloane reveals where to find the video on the Internet during her hearing.
- Everyone Has Standards: Schmidt says "Find another way" when Big Sam and Little Sam show off their fancy surveillance equipment. They still use the equipment, but not to blackmail anyone.
- Family Versus Career: Sloane never wanted to have a family and chose to focus 100 per cent on her career.
- Hauled Before A Senate Subcommittee: Sloane ends up being investigated for corruption and grilled in a Senate hearing. It turns out she'd engineered it all though to bring down her opponents.
- Heroic Bystander: Esme is nearly killed by a gun-wielding fanatic enraged by her pro-gun control activism, who's then fatally shot when a bystander with his own legal concealed pistol intervenes. Naturally, the gun lobby gleefully pounces on this, considering it a godsend, as her rescuer is (unsurprisingly) opposed to her views, with the Brady Campaign Esme works for scrambling to respond, noting the bill they support wouldn't affect her rescuer as his gun is legal. Esme finds it suspicious enough that at first she suspects a setup, but the film does not show that was the case.
- Hidden Depths: Schmidt is able to follow Sloane, who is careful about being followed, to her meeting with surveillance experts Big Sam and Little Sam. She doesn't know until he's outside their door.
- High-Class Call Girl: Gender Flip. Liz hires the "services" of male prostitutes, both to get sex and to have brief fantasies of a housewife life she always avoided.
- High-Powered Career Woman: The titular character is a cold, cutthroat, and highly competent lobbyist who is so ambitious that she willingly takes on lobbying against the notoriously difficult to counter American gun lobby just for the challenge. In the film we learn that she actively defied Family Versus Career by deciding long ago that her work is her passion and doesn't want anything to distract her from it.
- How Did You Know? I Didn't: When Sloane exposes the fact Cynthia has been meeting with Connors and gets fired for that, one of the other associates wonders how she knew Cynthia was the one. Sloane admits, "I didn't", and that she had them all followed.
- Married to the Job: Sloane dedicated her whole life to her job and never sought to get married. It took a toll somewhat, as she hires male prostitutes to have sex and feed her fantasies of another lifestyle.
- Mirthless Laughter: When Sloane finds out the gun lobby wants to hire her to sell guns to women.
- No Celebrities Were Harmed: The female Massachusetts senator who berates Sloane for her lack of contributions to feminism is quite clearly based on real-life Massachusetts senator and noted progressive Elizabeth Warren.
- Only in It for the Money: Averted. For the most part, Sloane is more interested in the challenge. Also, at the end we learn she was working for free the whole time.
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Daniel Posner, Sloane's lawyer for the hearings, gives her this after it looks like she's thrown out her right to keep quiet.Daniel Posner: No, I don't care about you any further than I can throw you. I work for the one ethical lobbying practice on the Hill and I wind up defending the... the poster child for the most morally bankrupt profession since faith-healing.
- Resign in Protest: Somewhat downplayed as Sloane is very cold about it, but when working at a powerhouse lobbying company she made it clear that she devoted her time only to issues she felt like working. When despite her firm line in the sand against working with the NRA her bosses try to force her to do so, she quits almost immediately, and about half of her subordinates leave with her.
- The Reveal:
- It turns out Sloane isn't the only person involved in political corruption speaking in the committee room.
- Also, the piece of paper Schmidt gave Sloane reveals she was working for free the whole time.
- Finally, Jane's been a Fake Defector; she's been working for Sloane the entire time.
- Screw the Money, I Have Rules!: Sloane picks her cases so she can sleep at night.
- Shout-Out:
- When Sloane quits her job and asks other people to come with her, Connors asks "What is this, Jerry Maguire?"
- When it seems Senator Sperling tricked Sloane into not invoking the Fifth Amendment, her lawyer Daniel says "The smartest operative on the Hill just got played by Grandpa Simpson."
- Stock Legal Phrases: Plenty used in the courtroom scenes:
- Sloane repeatedly pleads the Fifth to Sperling's questions until she reveals Sperling's shadiness.
- And of course, the phrase "Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?" is directed at most of the witnesses. Most of them don't comply.
- Taking You with Me: Sloane ultimately goes to prison, but not before revealing the bribery of Senator Sperling by Dupont, ruining the careers of both.
- Unspoken Plan Guarantee: The entire movie is one big instance of this trope. Only at the end is it revealed to both the audience and most of the characters that the entire plot, and possibly Sloane's entire career and life, were carefully planned to expose the corruption of the American political system.
