FILM REVIEW; Those Strange Bedfellows Haunt a Politician

A political thriller pumped with as much dramatic juice as ''The Contender'' doesn't have to be believable to be gripping. If it's realism you want, go rent the underappreciated ''Primary Colors.'' What makes this twisty, cautionary yarn, written and directed by Rod Lurie, delicious is a cast that chews the scenery with such obvious enjoyment that you're happy to put up with its tin-eared oratory and preposterous plot turns for the sake of a good ride.

Anchoring that cast is Jeff Bridges as a perpetually noshing Bill Clinton-like president named Jackson Evans whose sudden yens for dishes like coq au vin are instantly gratified by a White House kitchen staff that, oddly enough, can't handle a request for a simple Muenster cheese sandwich. In a movie jampacked with food metaphors, this president, his eyes gleaming mischievously, inveigles a squeamish opponent into sharing a shark steak sandwich.

As the story opens, President Evans is scurrying to fill the slot of a vice president who died three weeks earlier. One of the two leading candidates, Jack Hathaway (William Petersen), is a senator from Virginia who has just become a national hero after a fortuitous accident that the movie portrays in its opening scene. While Hathaway is fishing with a reporter, a car plunges off an adjacent bridge. The young driver drowns, but not before Hathaway dives into the water and risks his life trying to save her.

But almost from the beginning there's something fishy about Jack. His wife, Fiona (Kristen Shaw), is an insanely ambitious, hysterical shrew. Jack is also given to murmuring politically incorrect no-no's like referring to a female assistant as ''my girl.''

The other candidate -- the one with the president's backing -- is Laine Hanson (Joan Allen), an Ohio senator and a daughter of a former governor. An outspoken abortion rights advocate and self-professed atheist who recently switched party alliances from Republican to Democrat, Hanson is attractive, poised and extremely well spoken, if a bit reserved. (Next to her even Hillary Rodham Clinton begins to seem almost down-home.) Hanson is happily married to her former campaign manager (Robin Thomas) and is the mother of a 6-year-old boy.

When first seen, Hanson and her husband are making love just as the president calls and invites her to the White House. ''The Contender'' is so insistent on portraying Hanson as a sexual being that it later gives her an extremely silly and sexist declaration to the effect that a female president who isn't having sex regularly had better not have her finger anywhere near the nuclear trigger.

Hanson, by the way, is a not a meat eater. When a steak-devouring opponent urges her to try the porterhouse at a fancy Washington restaurant, she demurely refuses and insists on ordering the penne.

That enemy is the evil, Machiavellian Shelly Runyon (Gary Oldman), the chairman of the Congressional committee conducting Hanson's confirmation hearings. His right-hand man is an ambitious young Delaware congressman, Reginald Webster (Christian Slater), who emerges as having a few more scruples than his mentor. The right-wing Runyon, who loathes Hanson to her liberal bones, dispatches his dirty tricksters on a quest for filth, and they come up with a collection of murky snapshots, allegedly of Hanson (whose face isn't visible) having sex with two boys at a college fraternity party when she was 19.

The pictures, posted on the Internet, become tabloid television fodder. The plan is to destroy Hanson with embarrassment. Runyon skillfully turns the hearings into a smear campaign of innuendo in which he repeatedly challenges Hanson to deny that she is the woman in the photos.

Hanson resolutely refuses to make any comment. And as the right-wing vultures begin to circle, other evidence of Hanson's alleged immorality is introduced, and her poll rankings begin to skid. Ah, but never underestimate that crafty, shark-eating president who sticks by his nominee. He has some unexpected tricks up his sleeve that hurl the story forward just when it seems to be running out of steam.

''The Contender'' makes no bones about where its political sympathies lie. It is essentially a pro-Clinton editorial in the wake of the Lewinsky scandal and an angry brief against what it calls ''sexual McCarthyism'' and the dragging of private consensual sex into the public arena. But as another presidential election looms, the movie feels oddly out of touch with the electoral mood. That was then, and this is now, and the ethics of airing dirty linen, which is the movie's subject, don't seem to apply at the moment.

Although ''The Contender'' is much better written and directed than Mr. Lurie's last film, the clunky, ludicrous ''Deterrence,'' in which Kevin Pollak played a president coping with a Middle Eastern crisis, it still has the feel of a television drama. What lifts it above the mundane are its performances, especially those of Mr. Oldman and Ms. Allen.

Her portrait of this besieged nominee is an exquisitely subtle study of a strong, high-principled woman pushed to the breaking point. Ms. Allen, to her credit, ultimately resists turning Hanson into a heart-hugging martyr. It is a performance that transcends the material.

Mr. Oldman's unscrupulous congressman is almost as finely shaded. Except for one unfortunate rant, his insidious right-wing schemer is almost likable. Mr. Oldman cloaks the character in an aura of deep sadness owed in part to his hollow, childless marriage to an embittered woman. The cost of his pain and the rotting moral fiber that goes with it is visible in his every shot; the character appears almost scrofulous, the skin on his ashen face peeling from a corruption spreading just below the surface.

''The Contender'' is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It includes profanity and sexual situations.

THE CONTENDER

Written and directed by Rod Lurie; director of photography, Denis Maloney; edited by Michael Jablow; music by Larry Groupe; production designer, Alexander Hammond; produced by Marc Frydman, Douglas Urbanski, Willi Baer and James Spies; released by DreamWorks Pictures. Running time: 132 minutes. This film is rated R.

WITH: Gary Oldman (Shelly Runyon), Joan Allen (Laine Hanson), Jeff Bridges (President Jackson Evans), Christian Slater (Reginald Webster), Sam Elliott (Kermit Newman), William Petersen (Jack Hathaway), Saul Rubinek (Jerry Toliver), Philip Baker Hall (Oscar Billings), Kristen Shaw (Fiona Hathaway) and Robin Thomas (William Hanson).