Given the shenanigans that followed last year's presidential election, one could be forgiven for thinking there was no further point in lampooning a political process that seems to have a built-in farce mechanism, writes David Parkinson.

But, in The Contender, one-time critic Rod Lurie has managed to strike a successful satirical blow at the US system's soft (and hideously exposed) underbelly.

High profile...Joan Allen plays Ohio Senator Laine Hanson in The Contender

Borrowing heavily from Otto Preminger's 1962 Washington melodrama Advise and Consent, the story turns around a president's determination to leave his mark on history. So, when his vice-president dies unexpectedly, Jackson Evans (Jeff Bridges) overlooks Democratic wunderkind Jack Hathaway (William Petersen), who has more skeletons in his closet than Ed Gein, and opts, instead, for the safer hands of Ohio senator, Laine Hanson (Joan Allen).

However, he still has to get her through Congress's tigerish vetting system and that means putting one over on Sheldon Runyon (Gary Oldman), a Machiavellian Republican bent on playing puppetmaster to the compliant Hathaway.

The exploitation of a college sex scandal is a disappointingly lazy, almost Capraesque, plot device. But Lurie redeems himself by allowing President Evans to emerge victorious by means of a slick piece of political prestidigitation. Without exception the central performances are excellent. Allen and Bridges (who is particularly sharp as a smiling predator) both merited their Oscar nominations. Even Christian Slater manages to rein in his predilection for impersonating Jack Nicholson as a junior congressman prepared to betray anyone unsympathetic to his ambitions.

But they are all overshadowed by the mischievous scene-stealing of Gary Oldman, who makes light of some ridiculous make-up to capture precisely the kind of insider powerbroking that makes democracy such a nakedly deceitful illusion.

Yet, the fact that Lurie awards the best lines to his male stars puts Allen at something of a disadvantage. Laine Hanson may be decent, dignified and determined - but she's also a bit of a bore. However, the fact that she has to be seen to be so lilywhite (even though the lure of office means that she actually compromises more than the odd ideal en route to her inevitable elevation) says a great deal about the gender hypocrisy of democratic politics. As Clinton proved, it's okay for a bloke to be caught in flagrante - indeed, he's not really living up to the Kennedy legacy if he isn't. But the only sexual past a woman is allowed has to relate directly to the conception of her offspring.

The role was written specifically for Joan Allen and she plays it with considerable phlegm. But you have to wonder whether Lurie hasn't taken the easy way out by plumping for the gynocentric option. Surely he would have stirred up a more potent controversy had he made the contender African-American or had he inverted the plot altogether and made his candidate an unregenerate racist.

But then this isn't that kind of film. Its aim is not to unsettle the American electorate, but to reassure them. Its point is that no matter how seemingly misguided a president's dictat may seem, he always has the welfare of the state at heart and he always knows best. It's why Abraham Lincoln's reputation will remain unscathed even if Spielberg does make his revisionist biopic. It's why America will continue to fool in the affairs of the rest of the world because, no matter how much evidence there is to the contrary, the majority of the population thinks its own house is in order.