Once again, pop culture has trumped journalism. Better than any report or exposé, Mike Nichols' new movie Primary Colors captures the fractured soul and lost idealism of American politics.
Based on the anonymously written, fictionalized account of Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign, Primary Colors is not a great film, but it is a very affecting and revealing one. Freed of constraints like objectivity, unimpaired by the ideological mercenaries who argue ceaselessly about news and politics, this movie shows that film producers, writers, and actors have a unique opportunity to take us inside our degraded political system and give us a feel for what it's like.
Primary Colors, despite its hyped arrival, isn't really about sex, but about idealism - and how high-minded goals can't survive in contemporary politics as practiced in Washington. The movie's satire moves from humor to pathos swiftly and sometimes memorably.
Two knockout scenes and images are especially haunting. We see the Stanton (Clinton) candidate sitting alone, talking to a counterman in a doughnut shop, while across the street, frantic aides try to keep his candidacy afloat amidst a barrage of scandals and accusations. One can easily imagine our real president staring out at the Washington monument late at night, wondering how Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky got to define, perhaps even overwhelm, the presidency he worked all his life to get.
And we see how the faithful campaign consultant Libby, played by Kathy Bates, is driven mad by the understanding that the political couple who were once the sun and the moon have surrendered idealism for practicality and have knuckled under to the media and the cynical terms under which contemporary politics operate.
Libby points out mournfully that people who attach themselves to American politicians in this vicious and volatile era are living in reflected light.
This is not a hopeful movie. We support politicians who do the least evil, not those who stir or inspire us. In this movie, Mike Nichols spares us the now-clichéd scenes of screaming reporters and instead presents journalism in an invisible but ubiquitous way, a rapacious and unthinking beast, unseen but always waiting to devour anyone for whatever crass or self-serving purpose.
When it comes to politics, the press is an equal-opportunity destroyer. The press will go after anybody who feeds them the freshest meat. The contemporary Washington press corps is, in fact, an institution always happy to do evil but rarely eager to do much good.
Campaign aide Henry Burton, played by British actor Adrian Lester is the first character we meet. Seduced by Stanton, he's a hollow figure whose major function is to look stunned, repelled, and regretful.
Then there's Travolta, who has the Southern folksy Clinton down to a T, minus the president's obsessive smarts and grasp of statistics and policy details.
If Clinton is even remotely like Travolta's portrayal, the Monica Lewinsky affair seems not only plausible but inevitable. Perhaps what we really needed to grasp, after the Gennifer Flowers affair, wasn't how long it had gone on, but that something like it, or worse, would happen again. And again.
Emma Thompson, brilliant in the first-lady role, nearly steals the movie, along with Bates. She's the glue that holds her husband and his political campaign together, while he screws everything in sight, wolfs down apple fritters and doughnuts, and schmoozes charismatically with real folk. She is an idealist who has traded her soul to gain the big prize she and her husband have been seeking their whole lives.
While Travolta brings us a taste of Clinton's apparently uncontrollable appetites, Thompson helps us understand why his wife stands by him so stubbornly. Getting to the White House has become the focus of their whole lives, by any means and at any cost - to themselves or anybody else. Susan Stanton has been overlooking awful truths about her husband's faithlessness, sexuality, and morality for years - which may help us see why a White House blow job would hardly push her over the edge.
The Stantons got into politics for all the right reasons, but have wanted to get to the top so intensely and for so long they can't quite remember why. And it no longer really matters.
The best thing about Primary Colors is its reminder that morality is a complicated business, more nuanced than the moral guardians on Washington talk shows would have us believe. Stanton has vast appetites, for both food and women, but he also has genuine empathy for people with ordinary lives and a sincere desire to ease their troubles.
Here is where fact and fiction seem to mesh. As much as Clinton has tarnished himself and as much as he is resented by his enemies, he manages to convey the notion that he understands the plight of working mothers who lack day care and factory workers who lack the training to land modern jobs.
It's almost a theological question whether the good outweighs the bad. Although Washington journalists never waver in their single-minded self-righteousness, the rest of us aren't as sure where to draw the lines.
As a result, Primary Colors is sometimes bitingly funny, but ultimately no fun. You can't leave the theater laughing, not with the reality of the evening news waiting for you when you get home.
Although it's satirical, this movie is also a sordid and sad experience on many levels. It almost overpowers us with reminders of what the real scandal coming out of Washington is - just how degraded, vicious, cynical, and uninspiring politics is these days.
