It Was Never a Contender

I finally saw The Front Runner, the movie about Gary Hart's disastrous 1988 presidential campaign starring Hugh Jackman as Hart (below), and while the movie wasn't bad, it wasn't great either.  The critics found it unpersuasive as an argument for Hart's candidacy, and I found it unpersuasive in terms of reality.  

The Front Runner gets a few things right about the boiler-room atmosphere of political campaigns, and J.K. Simmons' performance as Hart campaign manager Bill Dixon is right on the money, as it shows how Dixon lost his idealism over the Bimini affair (Dixon never ran a political campaign again).  Also, you feel for Vera Farmiga's Lee Hart, who, as the candidate's wife, was humiliated by the scandal.  However, the whole film plays and feels like a cable-TV movie, and not necessarily one made for a premium channel.  The Front Runner, in that respect, feels rather thin and underdone.  It also relies on a composite character - not one of my favorite cinematic devices - in the form of a black actor playing a hybrid of E.J. Dionne and Paul Taylor, the two reporters who, respectively, interviewed Hart for the New York Times' Sunday magazine and asked Hart if he'd ever committed adultery.  Though based on Matt Bai's book about the Hart scandal, "All The Truth Is Out" (the title of which was taken from a line in Hart's favorite poem, William Butler Yeats' "To a Friend Whose Work Has Come To Nothing"), and though Bai co-wrote the script, the book concentrates on only a few characters and almost entirely on the immediate period of the scandal, in May 1987.  Cutting out the introductory scenes set in 1984, when Hart first ran for President, and delving into his attempted comeback in early 1988 would have made for a more well-rounded character study.

Director Jason Reitman pretty much took the Hart scandal and made it less compelling than it was in real life.  And oh yes, the movie is indeed clearly in Hart's corner, playing up his public virtues while shrugging off  his aloofness, his arrogance, and his inability to handle damage control - three deficiencies you don't want in a President.  Though, if you want an actor to play a charismatic politician with what Daryl Hall once called in one of his songs "movie star eyes," you can't go wrong with Hugh Jackman.

I only wish Reitman hadn't gone wrong in his filmmaking.