Review: The Front Runner

The Front Runner (15)

USA 2018  113 mins  Dir: Jason Reitman  Cast: Hugh Jackman, Vera Farmiga, J.K. Simmons, Alfred Molina, Sara Paxton

These are tough times for makers and connoisseurs of dramas about American politics. For decades, we’d been led to believe that strings were pulled by skilled yet shadowy Machiavellian manipulators exchanging zingy Aaron Sorkin/Armando Iannucci dialogue as they finessed focus-grouped candidates’ images and policies to appeal to their target demographics, while dodging potentially career-destroying ‘gaffes’ and indiscretions. Now, however, the game is up. This would have been a cause for rejoicing if it hadn’t turned out that a significant proportion of the electorate are credulous morons. Policies are reduced to idiot baseball cap slogans (Make America Great Again, Build the Wall, Lock Her Up), while PR disasters of both the pussy-grabbing and consorting-with-the-enemy variety can be batted away with the magic words “Fake news!” Only a couple of movies succeeded in anticipating this. One was Mike Judge’s terrific Idiocracy; the other was Jay Roach’s 2012 film The Campaign, which was dismissed, not unreasonably, as a low-rent comedy but now seems positively prescient in its portrayal of the Great American Public as gullible cretins responding in Pavlovian style to a dim-witted, philandering sleazebag candidate (Will Ferrell) who only has to remember three trigger words: America, Jesus and Freedom.

All of which is a rather long-winded way of saying that until dramatists have recalibrated their approach for the Trump era, the only way of doing these films is as period pieces. So here’s Jason Reitman’s account of the 1988 Gary Hart campaign. The fact that nobody today remembers the Democrat presidential hopeful may prove to be an impediment, but Reitman and his co-writers remind us that his downfall was a pivotal moment in American politics that left no one – press, politicians, spinners – covered in glory.

Handsome and youthful – some might say Kennedyesque, with all that this implies – Hart (Jackman) was a godsend to a Democrat Party then, as now, on the ropes and in desperate need of a suitably charismatic presidential candidate. So down with the kids is he that he’s dubbed an Atari Candidate and quizzed by the press about his skill at Asteroids (ask your dad) back in those olden times when journalists used payphones and photographs had to be developed in a darkroom. His cynical, hard-nosed campaign manager from central casting (Simmons, all snark and withering put-downs) rhapsodises that he’s never known anyone as “talented at untangling the bullshit of politics”. Even Washington Post veteran Bob Woodward, who famously helped bring down Nixon, admires his hair, which he reckons could be worth several extra points. Hart enjoys an overwhelming lead in the campaign to secure the Democratic presidential nomination. In just three short weeks, he completely blows it.

A flurry of Altmanesque overlapping conversations, cut between the press and campaign team, sets the scene with throwaway remarks about Hart’s wife Lee (Farmiga), who chooses to “look the other way” when it comes to extra-marital fornication. A gentleman’s agreement with the press permitted such unpresidential behaviour to go unreported in the past and Hart has no reason to suspect that he will be treated any differently when he brazenly cops off with Donna Rice (Paxton). Foolishly, he even invites hacks to follow him around, little anticipating that they’ll take him at his word. The Miami Herald is quickly on his tail and even Ben Bradlee’s (Molina) snooty Washington Post feels obliged to join in the feeding frenzy for fear of being left behind. Hart’s reputation lies in tatters quicker than you can coin the phrase “bimbo eruption”.

Hugh Jackman gives a terrific performance beneath his luxuriant wig as the indignant Hart, who tries to brazen it out by bullying reporters with the effrontery to ask about his marriage. “It’s nobody’s goddamn business. The public don’t care about this crap!” he blusters. But by now the proverbial genie is out of the bottle and his campaign is doomed. It doesn’t help that so much of this story is such a gift to reporters. The Hart family’s rural retreat is in Troublesome Gulch (no, really) and the alleged legover takes place aboard a yacht named Monkey Business.

Reitman chooses to film the encounter in wordless long shot cut cheekily to Boston’s Foreplay/Long Time, in which we don’t even see Rice’s face. Indeed, he seems strangely incurious about the woman who claims to be interested in joining the Hart campaign (“I like his positions”) but winds up having her life destroyed by the press, which is a little jarring in the #MeToo era. We are also expected to take on trust the assertion that Hart had the makings of a great president whose career was destroyed by tabloid sensationalism, rather than being just another ambitious stuffed suit with a gift for oratory and an inability to keep it in his pants. But at least this approach spares us too many knowing winks at 21st century audiences, until Hart’s angry, ill-tempered withdrawal speech during which he warns that if this sort of disgraceful intrusion carries on, “We may get the leaders we deserve.”