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John Travolta and Emma Thompson are definitely not the Clintons in Primary Colors |
Director: Mike Nichols
Cast: John Travolta (Governor Jack Stanton), Emma Thompson
(Susan Stanton), Adrian Lester (Henry Burton), Billy Bob Thornton (Richard
Jemmons), Kathy Bates (Libby Holden), Larry Hagman (Governor Fred Picker), Stacy
Edwards (Jennifer Rodgers), Maura Tierney (Daisy Green), Diane Ladd (Mamma
Stanton), Paul Guilfoyle (Howard Ferguson), Kevin Cooney (Senator Lawrence
Harris), Rebecca Walker (March Cunningham), Allison Janney (Miss Walsh),
Mykelti Williamson (Dewayne Smith)
In 1998, America was engrossed in what seemed like a
never-ending series of scandals around Bill Clinton, with Clinton facing
impeachment. The news was filled with Clinton-Lewinsky Scandal catch-ups
seemingly non-stop. Surely in the middle of that, a film that charted earlier
scandals about Slick Willie would be a hit? Well Primary Colors proved that wrong. A thinly veiled portrait of the
Clinton run for the White House, based on a novel written by Joe Klein who
followed the Clintons on the campaign, it tanked at the box office. Possibly due
to audiences having Clinton-fatigue – but also perhaps because it’s a stodgy,
overlong and slightly too pleased-with-itself piece of Hollywood political
commentary.
The film sticks pretty close to real-life timelines. John
Travolta is Arkansas Governor Jack Stanton (Travolta does a consistent
impersonation of Bill Clinton both vocally and physically during the whole
film), who’s running for the Democratic Presidential nomination, supported by
his (perhaps) smarter, ambitious wife Susan (Emma Thompson, doing a neat
embodiment of Hillary without impersonation). Eager young black political
operator Henry Burton (Adrian Lester) is recruited to help run the campaign –
and finds himself increasingly drawn into the secrets of the Stantons, not
least Jack’s persistent infidelities that seem to go hand-in-hand with his
empathy and genuine passion for helping people. As scandal builds on scandal,
the campaign to run for President becomes ever more unseemly.
Primary Colors
asks questions that, to be honest, are pretty familiar to anyone who has ever
seen a Hollywood film about politics. We’re presented with a Clinton-Stanton
who wants to help America to re-educate itself in a modern world, who weeps
with emotion when hearing a man recount his struggles with literacy (a fine
cameo from Mykelti Williamson), who wants to rebuild America’s economy and
build opportunities for all. And at the same time, he can’t keep it in his
pants, is quite happy to dodge as much as possible the consequences of his
actions, and is blithely disinterested in the impact his infidelities have on
other people. Essentially the film wants to ask: at what point does a man’s
personal behaviour and morals start to outweigh his good intentions?
It just takes a long time to ask it. A very long time. Primary Colors is a film that could
easily be half an hour shorter, and you would miss very little. It’s a stodgy,
overlong, smug drama that takes a gleeful delight in how clever it’s being making
a film about the Clintons that-isn’t-about-them. It’s weakened as well by using
an overly familiar device of putting a naïve and well-meaning audience
surrogate character at its centre. We’ve seen this growth of disillusionment
before, but Adrian Lester (in a break out role) fails to make Henry Burton a
really interesting character – he’s little more than a cipher that we can
project our views onto, and Lester is too reserved an actor to make him a
character we can effectively invest in as a person. Instead he becomes a
largely passive observer that more interesting characters revolve around.
Those characters being largely the Stantons themselves. John
Travolta does a very good impersonation of Clinton, but he offers very little
insight into the sort of person Clinton is, his motivations or his feelings.
Like the character, the role is all performance and you never get a sense of
how genuine his goals are and how much ambition is his main driver. As scandals
pile up, Travolta is great at capturing Clinton’s sense of hurt that anyone
would question his morals (even as his actions display his fundamental lack of
them), but the role is short on depth.
Emma Thompson gets less to play with as Hillary. In fact, she
disappears from the second half of the film, after an affair plotline between
her and Lester was cut completely from the film (something that makes certain
scenes, where actors are clearly responding to this non-existent plotline,
amusing to watch). But she manages to make the role something a little more
than impersonation, delivering a whipper-sharp, ambitious woman who has buried
her resentments about her husband’s betrayals under a wish to achieve a higher
goal.
The rest of the cast deliver decent performances, but the
stand-out is Kathy Bates as a long-time Stanton friend turned political fixer,
who sees her idealisation of the Stantons turn to bitter disillusionment. Bates
at first seems to be delivering another of her custom-made “larger than life”
roles, but as the stuff hits the fan she layers it with a real emotional depth
and complexity. It’s a caricature role that she turns into something real, a
woman who feels genuine pain at seeing her deeply held political convictions
and ideals being slowly disregarded by her heroes.
But then we get her point. Don’t we all feel a bit like that
when we think back about Bill Clinton? The more we learn about his affairs and
sexual scandals – and the more that #MeToo develops our understanding of how
powerful men can abuse their power to take advantage of star-struck young women
– the less sympathetic he seems. The film too suffers from some really
out-of-date views of male sexuality. Billy Bob Thornton’s political fixer
exposes himself early on in the film to a female worker, but this is shrugged
off as “banter”, as opposed to a criminal offence – and the film largely avoids
giving any air time to Stanton’s principal victim, the teenage daughter of a
black restauranter whom he may or may not have impregnated. Stanton casually
uses his power to gain sexual favours – one of his earliest acts is casually picking
up a gawky English teacher who’s giving him a guided tour of her school (a
funny cameo from Allison Janney) – but this is largely categorised as a
personal weakness that doesn’t impact his suitability for the Presidency,
something that feels more and more uncomfortable.
However, Primary
Colors’ real problem is that it is overlong and a little bit too pleased
with its intricate reconstruction of semi-true events. Although there are funny
lines and decent performances, the film lacks any real zip and it gives no real
insight into modern politics (other than perhaps deploring the compromises
politicians must make) or the Clintons themselves. Instead it settles for
telling us things we already know at great length and making safe but empty
points about modern America. Far from exploring a Faustian pact where we accept
deep personal failings in politicians because we believe that, overall, they
could be a force for good, instead Primary
Colors is all about turning shades of grey into obvious clear-cut moral
choices.
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