Long Shot (2019)

A romantic comedy in which the Secretary of State falls for a scruffy Brooklyn journalist, which is a premise that has been with us since roughly the invention of the motion picture. Jonathan Levine directs with affection for the 1980s template, and the picture does what it sets out to do. The question before us is not whether it works but what it carries inside it.

Charlotte Field is a woman of enormous authority who is condescended to by male advisers, who outmaneuvers a sitting president, and who is ultimately sworn in as the first female president. This is not nothing. Yet the arc resolves in a marriage and a change of surname, so the empowerment arrives wrapped in the oldest packaging available. Environmental conservation does real narrative work here: a global tree-preservation initiative is the spine of the political plot and the reason a media mogul turns villain. The mogul himself, played by Andy Serkis with a haircut that constitutes its own act of aggression, supplies a mild eat-the-rich streak, though the film is more interested in his corruption than in his class position. Fred quits a job on principle. That is as far as the indictment goes.

The supporting cast includes a Black best friend and an Indian-American campaign staffer, present and largely unremarked upon. A subplot in which that best friend reveals himself to be both Republican and Christian produces the film's most self-conscious moment, a lecture about rigid principles delivered to our hero, who has just said something genuinely racist about it. It is a scene that wants credit for the lesson it teaches. Elsewhere the film pauses for moral instruction when Fred shames Charlotte into delivering her honest environmental speech. The messaging sits beneath the jokes, surfacing when convenient, retreating when the next gag arrives. It is a pleasant film with an occasional conscience, which is a category we have catalogued many times before.