Primary Black & White
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Primary Black: & White A Good Political Book Makes a Bad Political Film By John Podhoretz From its first moment, Primary Colors lets you know that it considers itself a Very Important Film. There...
...Bates delivers the climactic speech about how Clinton has lost his ideals because people like her circle around him like planets around a bright star...
...They keep trying to bring him down to size, to show the real man behind the facade...
...When Stanton's most serious competitor is felled by a heart attack, Picker gets into the race just to hold the spot open for him...
...For Klein, the melodrama is part of the satire's comedy...
...But the movie becomes all melodrama and no comedy...
...There are no credits, just a gigantic American flag and a close-up of John Travolta's hand as it grasps another in portentous slow motion...
...Klein is the first writer to capture the way electoral politics is a grueling, thankless activity all of whose successful practitioners are insane...
...But nothing that happens in the movie version of Primary Colors seems to be happening on this earth...
...All the craziness has been toned down until a campaign seems less like a trip to a lunatic asylum than a day at a college dorm...
...In fact, Nichols and May have given all the women in the novel plastic surgery to soften their edges...
...to the extent he resembles Clinton, he's uncanny, but when he tries to give the character more shading, he's lost...
...He keeps swimming in and out of focus...
...The Susan Thomases character, easily the most vicious caricature in the book, becomes Hillary's nice, dim-bulb buddy...
...But Nichols and May get all tangled up in the twists and turns of Klein's satire, with its knowing fictionaliza-tion of events as disparate as Ross Perot's candidacy, Florida governor Lawton Chiles's psychiatric history, Vincent Foster's suicide, the mysterious deaths at the Mena airstrip, and Clinton's sexual peccadilloes...
...He doesn't really want the highest office in the land...
...His Jack Stanton is a force of nature—an outsized person who lives according to different rules from the rest of us...
...Where the movie really fails is in its depiction of Jack and Susan Stanton—Bill and Hillary...
...Kathy Bates, who steals the movie as the Betsy Wright character, comes across not as a lovable nutjob, but as the only sane person in an insane world...
...Nichols and May fall prey to the same disease that afflicts everyone in Hollywood who decides to make a movie about politics: They decide to show Washington how to do things right by constructing an ideal political figure they use as a stick to beat everybody else with...
...Klein's Picker may be a good man, but he's also a bit of a fool, and his spiel is as full of hot air as any other politician's—it's just more effective because it's new...
...Klein's novel has a wild freedom that is clearly the result of his liberation from his own fantasies about Clinton's greatness...
...It is particularly distressing to watch him try to throw a Clinton-sized temper tantrum in a car...
...Nichols and May, that legendary comedy team, lose their sense of humor when it comes to Clinton-style glad-handing...
...They're shocked, shocked to find politics going on in politics, and so the movie becomes heavy with sodden speeches about principles betrayed...
...That's true from the figurehead at the very top—Governor Jack Stanton, the Clinton stand-in played by Travolta—to the operatives and hangers-on who make their living off, and find their life's meaning in, Stanton...
...how do you hate a hurricane...
...The destruction of Picker by the Stanton campaign is the climactic event in both the novel and the movie, but even here Klein maintains his lightness of touch...
...This is almost exactly how the novel by "Anonymous" (okay, by Joe Klein) begins as well: "The handshake is the threshold act, the beginning of politics," Klein writes in the tone of casual assurance that makes the book the best American political novel— and certainly the funniest—since Billy Lee Brammer's The Gay Place in 1961...
...He is so overstimulated at The editor of the New York Post's editorial pages, John Podhoretz is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard...
...It's all happening in a country Nichols and May seem to know nothing about, to people they do not understand...
...Nichols and May, however, come on like Captain Renault in Casablanca...
...What is so exhilarating about the book is its impiety...
...Take the way director Mike Nichols and screenwriter Elaine May deal with the business of Stanton in the doughnut shop...
...The movie version manages to be extraordinarily faithful to the book while at the same time capturing very little of its flavor...
...Watching Travolta play Clinton gives you a headache...
...As played by Larry Hagman, Picker is some kind of political saint...
...The lure of the soapbox proves too great for them to resist...
...As Susan/Hillary, Emma Thompson has been David Brock-ized, her character stripped of all the cold calculation she possessed in the novel...
...In Dave and The American President, two political comedies that preceded Primary Colors this decade, a conscienceless leader is magically turned into a well-meaning liberal who balances the budget and creates a nationwide jobs program even as he outlaws the ownership of guns...
...But Nichols and May are hopelessly confused about Stanton, and thus about Clinton as well...
...She weeps and wails, and it doesn't mean anything—even though what she says is certainly true about the Clintons and the Clintonites...
...he is making a point about the circus-like nature of politics in our time...
...he's pursuing it only out of a becoming modesty...
...Nobody will go to see Primary Colors for its plot surprises...
...But if, as Michael Dukakis said, the fish rots from the head down, then it's Stan-ton/Clinton who's the craziest of them all...
...As a result, Primary Colors remains a deeply unsatisfying movie...
...They all live at a pace that could drive anyone mad...
...the end of every campaign day that he sits for hours in a doughnut shop in the middle of the night gabbing relentlessly to the handicapped kid at the counter...
...Here, the ideal figure is Freddy Picker, an amalgam of Perot and Chiles who poses the greatest threat to Jack Stan-ton's candidacy because he is a straight talker and straight shooter...
...All the details are the same, but the tone is entirely different...
...All Travolta ends up seeming is pouty, not titanically out of control...
...everybody knows that Clinton won the election...
...It was Klein's insight that even the man behind the facade turns out to be a facade...
...Klein doesn't hate Clinton...
...The movie's Hillary has, instead, been tricked and corrupted by her devilishly charming husband...
...Stanton's presence isn't a telling example of his manic energy but of the way he really cares for the little guy...
Vol. 3 • March 1998 • No. 28
