A MAN'S WORLD: 'Girlfight' & 'The Contender'.

Karyn Kusama's Girlfight opens with seventeen-year-old Diana Guzman (Michelle Rodriguez) in a hallway of her Brooklyn high school. Decked out in army fatigues, she glowers at the camera with a hooded, bellicose look, scary in its intensity. "That bitch is psycho!" screams a classmate during a girls' room altercation, and it seems about right. Diana is pissed off at life and spoiling for a fight. At the neighborhood gym where her brother boxes, she convinces his skeptical trainer Hector (Jaime Tirelli) to take her on as well. Soon she's pounding the heavy bag, letting the sweet science hone and channel her rage.

The current mini-boom in women's boxing is largely an upscale hobby. But it's the traditional, boxer-as-angry-outsider story that Girlfight is after, with an added obstacle thrown in--gender. Diana doesn't fit the mold of femininity in her immigrant Latino world. She bristles when her girl friends primp before the mirror, and scorns their lovelorn sighs--"How come everything has to be romance with you?" she asks. She's tall, and tough, and while she does like boys, flirting repulses her. "Would it kill you to wear a skirt once in a while?" complains her macho father, Sandro (Paul Calderon). Sandro drinks, and the film hints at a history of domestic violence that drove his wife to suicide. He envisions his son as a boxer, his daughter a receptionist "in a nice office." Diana wants none of that, any more than she wants to wear a skirt. Every time she unleashes an uppercut in the ring, it's a blow against horizons that have been set too narrowly for her.

In her screen debut, Michelle Rodriguez is fabulous to look at--her face brooding so intensely that the first appearance of a smile has a winning drama all its own. Girlfight surrounds her with familiar fight-movie elements: the decrepit gym, decorated with hortatory slogans; the wizened coach with his own agenda of disappointments. And while Diana herself may not have seen many fight movies, she's entranced by the pageantry of the show. Hector takes her to the fights, and through her rapt gaze we glimpse the ref waving a bout off and hugging the losing boxer in an embrace that is both protection and consolation. It's a lovely depiction of a girl wanting into the world of male intimacies.

By and large, however, such subtlety eludes first-time director Kusama, who pushes the role-reversal theme way too hard, giving her film the neatness of a diagram. It's one thing to make Diana's brother, Tiny, effeminate and kind where Diana is masculine and blunt--but does he have to aspire to be an artist, too? When Diana goes out with a young fighter named Adrian (the girl's name in Rocky--remember?), does she really have to chow down on the bacon double cheeseburger while he eats a garden salad? In one ludicrous scene, Diana beats up her father, nearly strangling him on the kitchen floor as her brother pleads, "Please Diana, stop!" Kusama wants to subvert our conventional expectations, but what gets subverted instead is reality.

The film's denouement, a highly improbable Romeo vs. Juliet main bout, leaves Kusama with a dilemma. A male opponent small enough for Diana to handle would have to be a scrappy waif of a flyweight. But movie romance requires someone who's, well, manly. Kusama opts for the latter: Santiago Douglas, who plays Adrian, is five inches taller and twenty pounds heavier than Michelle Rodriguez, and it's unimaginable that her character could win the slugfest. Not daring to cast a male against leading-man type seems like a failure of conviction on Kusama's part. Everything does have to be romance, after all.

"Adrian," Diana says after the fight, "you boxed with me like any other guy, you showed me the same respect you show men." Girlfight won both the Grand Jury Prize and the Director's Award at Sundance this year; but despite its gritty, low-key look, the film wanders into downright corniness and summer movie feel-goodism. Then again, sociology is a high-concept approach to character, and so perhaps it shouldn't surprise that an ending as sentimental as this one can in fact be both PC and HC--Hollywood Correct--at once.

The Contender also portrays a woman daring to enter a man's world, and the mayhem that ensues. This time it isn't the ring, but the arena of national politics, where careers and reputations are demolished with the flick of a jab--whap--as casually as that.

The battle begins when the president, Jackson Evans (Jeff Bridges), moves to fill the slot opened by the death of his vp. His choice is Laine Hanson (Joan Allen), a senator from a distinguished political family. Hanson has enemies. Some oppose her because she's a woman, others because she switched parties years back; others just want to embarrass the president. Led by Shelly Runyon (Gary Oldman), the right-wing, Machiavellian chairman of the congressional committee handling Hanson's nomination, these foes unearth photos that purport to show Hanson engaged in a fraternity sex orgy decades ago. Wham. Whap. Pow. It's nasty time.

Written and directed by a former movie critic, Rod Lurie, The Contender may spark burning career hopes in America's film reviewers, but if you're looking to have your faith in public service bolstered, don't look here. In this Beltway free-for-all, sleaze engenders sleaze; blow begets counterblow. "What have you got on Runyon?" President Evans bellows to his chief of staff as his nominee's troubles deepen. "Give me something sexual!" Hanson herself, meanwhile, clings to a tight-lipped refusal to comment on her private life. "It is simply beneath my dignity," she says. Or is she just hiding behind principle?

The Contender has the feel of TV's popular "The West Wing," with staffers multitasking like mad in the halls of the White House, obsessing over polls and news leaks, and leavening their ferocity with deadpan humor. But where "The West Wing" faithfully uncovers a core of unbudging idealism in every episode, The Contender threatens to leave us with nothing but an ever deepening dig through layers of cynicism, ambition, betrayal, and rage. There are no issues, only grudges and strategies. Gracious collegiality fronts for vicious backroom power plays--"We have to gut the bitch in the belly," leers one of Hanson's enemies. The film's soundtrack picks up characters breathing and chewing and swallowing, the trickly sound of saliva, mouths that are either too wet or too dry. You keep wanting to move the mike back; and as for the shine of sweat on Runyon's lip as he zeroes in for the kill, you don't really want to be seeing that, either. And you thought politics was about ideas? Wrong! It's the appetite, stupid. It's the belly. Just listen.

The politics of The Contender are nominally Clintonian, but political opportunism is a bipartisan talent. Oldman plays Runyon as part Joe McCarthy, part Newt Gingrich, and his public destruction of Hanson--praising her at the hearings for not dignifying the swirling sexual rumors with a response, even as he steers all America to the Web site where the pictures are--is a dance of cynicism so smooth it's almost graceful. As for Jeff Bridges, he's terrific. Bridges began his career playing golden-boy types in films like The Last Picture Show and Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. In middle age he is not quite the suavely handsome leading man one would have predicted, but rather a faintly depraved version of it; there's something wild in his brow and his lurid, grinning stare, some Jekyll-and-Hyde capacity for craziness, and he uses it to superb effect as President Jackson Evans. Evans is part Clinton, part LBJ, a bluff good ol' boy who uses his physical presence, his very joviality, to intimidate. When a first-term Democratic representative (Christian Slater) who opposes Hanson is called to the White House, Evans offers him a sandwich, then, as the congressman uncomfortably munches it, Evans smilingly details how he is going to annihilate him.

Lurie lets his characters romp through a moral quagmire so gooey, it's hard to see how anyone is going to escape unslimed. The only person with half a chance seems to be Hanson herself, and it's the film's conceit that to do so, she may have to allow herself to be dirtied publicly beyond recognition--and refrain from using the weapons her allies keep handing her. The film's closing scenes take this notion to astonishing lengths. I won't give away the details, but by the end, there's enough redemption and triumphant idealism to last a whole season of "The West Wing." Amid swelling patriotic music, President Evans morphs into a Boy-Scout-in-Chief, promising to "heal this nation" and restore "the glory of this democracy." You search for the irony--who's he nailing this time?--but it isn't there. It's as if Lurie has forgotten the first hour and a half of his own movie. There's an almost Victorian tilt to The Contender's brutally happy ending: a fallen man--a whole city of fallen men--reformed by one woman of principle. Not only that, but you don't hear them chewing anymore, either.