A senator with a bright future and a divided heart
The Seduction of Joe Tynan, released in 1979 and directed by Jerry Schatzberg, is the film Alan Alda wrote for himself, and it is one of the most personal works of his career. Alda plays Joe Tynan, a liberal United States senator from New York, a man with a good record, a good family, and a plausible path to higher office. He is liked by his colleagues, respected by the press, and loved by his wife, Ellie, played by Barbara Harris, a psychologist who has built a career of her own. Joe’s life looks settled. The film’s title tells us that it will not stay settled, and that the seduction in question is not only romantic. It is also political, the seduction of power itself.
The story turns on a Supreme Court nomination. An older senator, played by Melvyn Douglas, asks Joe to support a nominee whose past includes support for segregation. Joe is asked to look the other way for the sake of party loyalty and his own advancement. Instead, he is drawn into an effort to block the nomination, working with Karen Traynor, a young Louisiana lawyer played by Meryl Streep, who has uncovered the nominee’s record. Karen is smart, idealistic, and unafraid, and Joe finds himself admiring her, then relying on her, then falling in love with her. At the same time, his opposition to the nomination makes him a hero to some and a threat to others, and suddenly the quiet senator from New York is being talked about as presidential material.
Alda’s screenplay is sharp about Washington without turning it into a cartoon. The senators in the film are not all corrupt, and they are not all noble. They are men, and a few women, trying to balance principle, friendship, ambition, and survival in a system that rewards compromise. Rip Torn plays Senator Kittner, a blustering colleague, and Charles Kimbrough plays Francis, Joe’s loyal aide, who watches his boss’s rise with a mixture of pride and worry. Schatzberg directs in a relaxed, observational style, letting conversations run and letting the camera watch faces as decisions are made. The film feels less like a thriller than like a portrait of a man slowly discovering what he is willing to trade for success.
Two women, two versions of a life
The heart of the film is the contrast between Ellie and Karen, and Alda writes both women with unusual respect. Ellie is not a long-suffering wife waiting at home. She is a professional woman with her own work, her own opinions, and a marriage that has grown thin because Joe is so often in Washington while she and their children are in New York. Harris plays her with warmth and exasperation, a woman who loves her husband but is tired of being an afterthought in his schedule. Karen, meanwhile, is not a simple temptress. Streep, then at the start of her extraordinary film career, plays her as a serious, funny, and politically committed young lawyer who is genuinely drawn to Joe’s ideals as much as to Joe himself. The affair that develops between them is not sordid. It is sad, because both people know it cannot last and both know it will cost something.
Alda plays Joe as a man who rarely makes a dramatic decision. He drifts, he reacts, he lets others push him a little further than he intended to go, and then he discovers that he has gone too far to turn back easily. That passivity is the point. Joe is not a villain who plots his own corruption. He is a decent man who is flattered by attention, excited by power, and unwilling, at first, to admit that his private choices and his public choices are connected. When he finally does admit it, the film does not reward him with a triumphant speech. It leaves him with a marriage to repair, a career to reconsider, and a clearer, more painful understanding of himself.
The political story and the personal story mirror each other. Joe blocks a nominee for reasons that are partly principled and partly opportunistic. He tells himself he is acting for justice, and in part he is. But he also knows that the fight has made him famous, and fame is a drug in Washington. Similarly, his affair with Karen begins with shared work and shared ideals, but it becomes a private escape from the difficulties of his marriage. Alda’s script understands that people rarely lie to themselves in grand ways. They lie in small ways, a little at a time, until the small lies add up to a life they did not intend to live.
Alda the writer, Alda the star
The Seduction of Joe Tynan was Alda’s screenwriting debut, and it announced him as a writer to be taken seriously. He had already written many episodes of M*A*S*H, but a feature screenplay about politics, marriage, and ambition was a different challenge. He meets it with dialogue that sounds like real Washington talk: quick, witty, evasive, and occasionally blunt. He also gives himself a role that is deliberately unflattering. Joe Tynan is charming, but he is also weak, and Alda does not soften that weakness. He lets the audience see Joe avoiding a hard conversation with Ellie, or enjoying a compliment from a power broker a little too much, and those moments make Joe human rather than heroic.
Schatzberg, who had directed The Panic in Needle Park and Scarecrow, brings a documentary-like attention to Washington locations and Senate corridors. The film does not look like a glossy political fantasy. It looks like a workplace, with offices, hearing rooms, and hotel suites where deals are discussed over drinks. That realism helps the story. When Joe is seduced, he is not seduced in a palace. He is seduced in ordinary rooms, by ordinary flattery, which is how seduction usually happens.
The film was not a huge commercial hit, but it has aged well, and it feels strikingly modern in its understanding of how ambition works. It also stands as a bridge in Alda’s career. After writing and starring in Joe Tynan, he would go on to write and direct The Four Seasons two years later, completing his move from television star to filmmaker. Watch The Seduction of Joe Tynan for Alda’s writing as much as for his acting. Notice how he gives Streep and Harris the best lines, how he lets Joe be wrong without making him a fool, and how the film’s final scenes refuse easy forgiveness. It is a grown-up political drama, and it remains one of the most thoughtful films Alda ever made.