Early Days

I was, um, seven and eight when it was going down, so it's not like I know what was going down, but I think it's fascinating that Bill Clinton's 1992 run for president produced two of the greatest movies about political campaigns in the last ten years.  It helps that the standard is kind of low: when we've got stuff like Swing Vote to tide us over, anything with a scintilla of realism is going to look good.  But I've rewatched both Primary Colors and Definitely, Maybe recently, and, as someone who's both worked on and covered campaigns, been struck by how well both movies capture the dynamics of campaigning, and the interactions between campaign staff and the press.

The campaign scenes in both movies are terrific.  In Primary Colors there's something very slightly and amazingly surreal about Henry Burton's (Adrian Lester) arrival in Arkansas headquarters.  He's greeted with a lot of drawls, and a lot of incompetence, and ends up groaning "Doesn't anyone have ANY special skills?" all to the tune of "On The Road Again."(Primary Colors has one of the wickedest, wittiest soundtracks I've ever heard.)  The response: a dude who raises a tentative hand to say "I speak Hebrew."  In ARKANSAS.  Of course, Burton whips the guy into shape and several scenes later has him charming rabbis across the country by phone.  The scenes have great roots in the freak show that was Arkansas politics, but they have the same rhythm, the same bad hotels and cheap, empty commercial spaces for headquarters that I remember from my own days knocking doors in New Haven.  Burton's character is dumped by his journalist girlfriend, who ends up muckraking a major story about Jack Stanton, the Bill Clinton character, as a result, and the scenes between them are sharply-drawn and tenderly bitter.

Definitely, Maybe is based in New York, so the freak show is out, but the industrial desks with phones on them, and the office's triumph when Will Hayes (Ryan Reynolds) sells $50,000 worth of tickets to a fundraising dinner, are absolutely right.  As is a later scene when the entire staff of a Mayoral campaign freaks out when they discover that the menus for a major dinner don't have a union seal on them, a level of detail that is dead-on, and so fine-grained I never expected I'd see it in a Hollywood movie.  Hayes treats his reporter girlfriend poorly in one of the movie's true sour notes: they get together when she writes a puff profile of the Mayoral candidate, and he dumps her, viciously, when she goes back and does the job she should have done the first time around.

In a way, Definitely, Maybe is a successor story to Primary Colors that chronicles America's falling out of love with Bill Clinton.  While Henry Burton stays with the campaign at the end of Primary Colors (something the movie reveals but that the novel leaves ambiguous, and is only resolved in a throw-away paragraph in Joe Klein's companion novel The Running Mate), Hayes moves on afterwards, and in a period when his life is falling apart, denies his former idol during the Monica Lewinsky.  Later, he runs into the president jogging in Central Park (Clinton actually did a cameo for the movie) but gets a mere thumbs-up and a dismissal--and then goes home to sign his divorce papers.

I don't know why the '92 Clinton campaign produced such terrific movies.  Maybe it's because it was a glorious mess that barely held together, maybe because it created a generation of political icons who were flawed and crazy and interesting.  I don't know if the Obama campaign will produce the same kind of movies.  Flaws are interesting: beautiful execution isn't, always.