Film
The Front Runner
- Director
- Jason Reitman
- Certificate
- 15
- Running Time
- 113 mins
The Gary Hart story winds up as a comedy. Gary who? Well, that may be part of the challenge facing Jason Reitman‘s film, which singularly failed to set the US box office alight. The other problem is that Reitman bravely takes a sympathetic view of the philandering US presidential candidate, who’d be crucified on social media if he was seeking office today.
But, hey, the past is a different country, right? Even the recent past of 1988, where we find Hart (Hugh Jackman, labouring under a Kennedy-style wig) as the latest in a long run of charismatic womanising Democrat presidential hopefuls, whose career is scuppered when he’s photographed partying with a woman named Donna Rice (Sara Paxton) aboard a yacht named – oh dear – Monkey Business. Vera Farmiga plays the unfortunate Mrs Hart in this adaptation of Matt Bai‘s book All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid, which explores the template-setting political scandal that you may be forgiven for having forgotten. But plenty of Veep/West Wing-style zingy dialogue makes it a treat for connoisseurs of films about US politics. Go here for our review.
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