☆☆
How did the makers of The Front Runner take a true-life story set in the 1980s and filled with sex, lies and politics -- a story that even has Miami drug dealers on its fringe -- and make it boring? It's hard to imagine a movie being botched this badly. The only comparison is the way Gary Hart drove his own presidential campaign into the ground with alarming speed, but at least Gary Hart's real-life story was never dull. That's much more than can be said for the movie that finally got made about this sordid moment in presidential history.
The Front Runner moves at a funereal pace and approaches its story with a hand that isn't just heavy, it's leaden. Director Jason Reitman is trying, apparently, to channel the spirit of Robert Altman and his multi-layered style of filmmaking, which stuffed both the frame and the soundtrack with dizzying amounts of information and story. Give Reitman credit for trying, but the effort doesn't work, and instead gets The Front Runner off to a confusing and rocky start from which it never recovers.
But that's also in part because from those very first moments Reitman and co-screenwriters Matt Bai and Jay Carson take a completely straightforward approach to telling the story -- not entirely factual (it invents, awkwardly, a young Washington Post reporter, among other liberties) but in its dry, by-the-numbers accounting of the way Hart went from 1988 presidential front-runner status to disgraced has-been in just a few weeks.
That fall from grace in the public eye and Hart's steadfast insistence that the public has no interest in tawdry tabloid tales when reporters seem to catch him in what appears to be an affair. But not everything is as it seems, Hart keeps insisting, and wants to try to keep the story focused on a panoply of policy-based issues.
The movie is based on All the Truth is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid, screenwriter Bai's chronicling of the events that enthralled Americans in the spring of 1987. But if the movie gets (most of) the details right, it utterly misses the meaning behind it all. There's talk throughout the movie -- a lot of talk -- about how Hart's misdeeds and the media's frenzied response would affect politics forever, and obviously the movie has more than a few parallels to our current age, in which a president was elected because of his tabloid-style celebrity.
But those knowing winks to 2018 audiences don't really relate to Gary Hart's story; what does is the complete failure of a seasoned politician to be able to reflect on his own actions and save his campaign. Hart, who is played with little zeal by a mostly charmless Hugh Jackman, is relegated a secondary character in his own scandal -- The Front Runner bounces back and forth between his campaign staff (led by a seemingly bored JK Simmons); his wife, Lee (Vera Farmiga, trying hard to find something to work with here), who is stuck in their Colorado home and surrounded by press; the fictional Post reporter (Mamoudou Athie, who gives by far the most intriguing performance); Donna Rice (Sara Paxton, weepy-eyed with no character at all), and reporters and editors like Ben Bradlee (Alfred Molina, entirely miscast) and Miami Herald reporter Tom Fiedler (Steve Zissis).
It might be something to see all of these characters dancing around each other to create the media frenzy that erupted, doing an intricate dance between media and politics as the public watched, wide-eyed -- that might have made for a biting, relevant satire. That's not what The Front Runner is all about, even though its one-sheet poster offers a delicious image of Hart's campaign bus flying off a cliff while reporters chase after it. A movie like that could have been the Dr. Strangelove of our modern political system, but the movie that Reitman has made is sleepy, dull and uninteresting, a recitation of facts that finally has nowhere to go but a title card that reminds us that Gary and Lee Hart are still married.
What are we to make of the fact that a woman whose husband cheated on her in one of the most high-profile and public scandals in modern American politics stood by her husband and still does? What are we to gather from the indignation of the campaign staff who cry foul over tabloid journalism? Or of the voracious need of media to fill ever minute of a 24-hour news cycle?
The Front Runner doesn't offer any answers or perspectives; it just kind of sits there and lets us fidget in our seats, hoping something interesting will happen, until it's over.
If we learned anything from the Gary Hart scandal, you'd never know it by watching this movie. I mean, we did learn something ... didn't we?
Viewed November 25, 2018 -- AMC Sunset 5
1430
The Front Runner moves at a funereal pace and approaches its story with a hand that isn't just heavy, it's leaden. Director Jason Reitman is trying, apparently, to channel the spirit of Robert Altman and his multi-layered style of filmmaking, which stuffed both the frame and the soundtrack with dizzying amounts of information and story. Give Reitman credit for trying, but the effort doesn't work, and instead gets The Front Runner off to a confusing and rocky start from which it never recovers.
But that's also in part because from those very first moments Reitman and co-screenwriters Matt Bai and Jay Carson take a completely straightforward approach to telling the story -- not entirely factual (it invents, awkwardly, a young Washington Post reporter, among other liberties) but in its dry, by-the-numbers accounting of the way Hart went from 1988 presidential front-runner status to disgraced has-been in just a few weeks.
That fall from grace in the public eye and Hart's steadfast insistence that the public has no interest in tawdry tabloid tales when reporters seem to catch him in what appears to be an affair. But not everything is as it seems, Hart keeps insisting, and wants to try to keep the story focused on a panoply of policy-based issues.
The movie is based on All the Truth is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid, screenwriter Bai's chronicling of the events that enthralled Americans in the spring of 1987. But if the movie gets (most of) the details right, it utterly misses the meaning behind it all. There's talk throughout the movie -- a lot of talk -- about how Hart's misdeeds and the media's frenzied response would affect politics forever, and obviously the movie has more than a few parallels to our current age, in which a president was elected because of his tabloid-style celebrity.
But those knowing winks to 2018 audiences don't really relate to Gary Hart's story; what does is the complete failure of a seasoned politician to be able to reflect on his own actions and save his campaign. Hart, who is played with little zeal by a mostly charmless Hugh Jackman, is relegated a secondary character in his own scandal -- The Front Runner bounces back and forth between his campaign staff (led by a seemingly bored JK Simmons); his wife, Lee (Vera Farmiga, trying hard to find something to work with here), who is stuck in their Colorado home and surrounded by press; the fictional Post reporter (Mamoudou Athie, who gives by far the most intriguing performance); Donna Rice (Sara Paxton, weepy-eyed with no character at all), and reporters and editors like Ben Bradlee (Alfred Molina, entirely miscast) and Miami Herald reporter Tom Fiedler (Steve Zissis).
It might be something to see all of these characters dancing around each other to create the media frenzy that erupted, doing an intricate dance between media and politics as the public watched, wide-eyed -- that might have made for a biting, relevant satire. That's not what The Front Runner is all about, even though its one-sheet poster offers a delicious image of Hart's campaign bus flying off a cliff while reporters chase after it. A movie like that could have been the Dr. Strangelove of our modern political system, but the movie that Reitman has made is sleepy, dull and uninteresting, a recitation of facts that finally has nowhere to go but a title card that reminds us that Gary and Lee Hart are still married.
What are we to make of the fact that a woman whose husband cheated on her in one of the most high-profile and public scandals in modern American politics stood by her husband and still does? What are we to gather from the indignation of the campaign staff who cry foul over tabloid journalism? Or of the voracious need of media to fill ever minute of a 24-hour news cycle?
The Front Runner doesn't offer any answers or perspectives; it just kind of sits there and lets us fidget in our seats, hoping something interesting will happen, until it's over.
If we learned anything from the Gary Hart scandal, you'd never know it by watching this movie. I mean, we did learn something ... didn't we?
Viewed November 25, 2018 -- AMC Sunset 5
1430
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