The Front Runner
Jason Reitman (2018)
In 1984, Gary Hart narrowly lost the Democratic presidential nomination to Walter Mondale, who went on to lose heavily to Ronald Reagan in the same year’s election. In 1986, Hart decided not to seek re-election as a Senator for Colorado in the mid-terms in order to focus on a run for President in 1988. He became the clear front-runner for the Democratic nomination and, indeed, for the White House. In May 1987, press reports of an extra-marital affair suddenly halted his candidacy. Jason Reitman’s The Front Runner, after a prologue in 1984, concentrates on the three weeks three years later that derailed Hart’s campaign.
Until the scandal gathers momentum, Reitman seems to be marking time. His pacy description of campaign operations is competent in its familiar, semi-documentary way (if memory serves, Michael Ritchie was using a similar technique in The Candidate back in 1972). But none of Hart’s team of young political idealists registers as an individual: it’s no surprise that, at the business end of the narrative, their disillusionment feels perfunctory. The film’s shortcomings aren’t enough, though, to explain why it’s fared so poorly at the box office and received such a lukewarm critical reception. The scale of this failure has to be down to timing. The source material is a 2014 book All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid by Matt Bai (who wrote the film’s screenplay with Reitman and Jay Carson). The Front Runner went into production in early 2017, when the story of how a highly intelligent and purposeful politician was undone by allegations about his sex life had renewed tragic meaning. An imbecilic and flagrantly corrupt, though no less purposeful, non-politician had just won the American presidency, with little to suggest that revelations of (self-proclaimed) sexual misconduct had done him electoral harm. In June 2017, Hugh Jackman signed to play Gary Hart; principal photography began that September. A few weeks later, the New York Times and the New Yorker published their Harvey Weinstein exposés, and the Me Too and Time’s Up movements took off. A powerful man accused of sexually exploiting a woman – be that man ever so un-Trump-like – was no longer commercially viable or, for many film critics, morally acceptable as a victim figure in a mainstream movie.
And it’s as a victim, of indefensibly aggressive press treatment, that Jason Reitman presents Gary Hart. As a prophet too: Reitman means the audience to leave the cinema with Hart’s words, as he announced the end of his campaign, ringing in our ears: ‘I tremble for my country when I think we may, in fact, get the kind of leaders we deserve’. We know now who he’s talking about. The film gives the impression that the events of May 1987 finished Hart. There’s no mention of his short-lived attempt to resurrect his presidential ambitions in late 1987 (although he polled consistently poorly, he continued as a candidate in the Democratic primaries until after Super Tuesday in March 1988). There’s no mention of his distinguished later career in public service, including as Vice-Chair of the Homeland Security Advisory Council then as US Special Envoy to Northern Ireland during the Obama years. There’s only one closing legend on the screen. It tells us that Hart and his wife Lee remain ‘married to this day’. (Last year marked the couple’s sixtieth wedding anniversary.)
The Front Runner’s characterisation of the journalists who brought down Hart is much less flattering – and in sharp contrast to the glorification of press freedom in The Post, just this time last year. The prime movers were the Miami Herald. Their (fictional) publisher (Kevin Pollak) is a slimy and nasty piece of work. Their journalist Tom Fiedler (Steve Zissis), who first gets an anonymous tip-off about Hart’s meetings with Donna Rice (Sara Paxton), is a cartoon of anxious inadequacy. When Fiedler, another hack (Bill Burr) and a Herald photographer (Nyasha Hatendi) are on a stake-out of Hart’s Washington DC townhouse, they make a comically inept job of it. At the Washington Post, the latest screen Ben Bradlee (Alfred Molina), though a cut above the Miami Herald posse, isn’t the heroic editor of All the President’s Men, let alone The Post. In The Front Runner, Bradlee’s most memorable remark is recalling a meeting with Lyndon Johnson a few weeks after the assassination of John F Kennedy, when LBJ told a group of pressmen, ‘You’re gonna see young women going in and coming out of those doors, and I hope you’ll extend us the same courtesy as you did Jack’[1].
The moral of Bradlee’s anecdote is that, twenty-odd years later, the press can no longer turn a blind eye to the personal lives of those in public office or running for it. The thesis of Reitman’s film seems to be that the journalists involved in Gary Hart’s fall from grace were creating rather than trying to satisfy a public appetite for scandal: the script (accurately) quotes polls of the time that indicated most voters were less concerned by Hart’s alleged marital infidelity than by the media treatment of him. The Front Runner‘s main weakness, however, is that, in concentrating on Hart as a man more sinned against than sinning, it doesn’t explore sufficiently what motivated his obstinate reaction to the Miami Herald accusations. Since his campaign manager (J K Simmons) and everyone else on Hart’s team recognise from the start the damaging potential of the Donna Rice story, the candidate’s contemptuous dismissal of it is striking – the more striking because he’s immediately contrite when he talks with his wife Lee (Vera Farmiga) about it. His view that the Rice allegations shouldn’t matter is intellectually credible; his insistence that they won’t matter is baffling, especially since Hart already has form. When the young Washington Post reporter A J Parker (Mamoudou Athie)[2], the one ethically thoughtful journalist in the film, asks a question, before the Rice story has broken, about Hart’s periods of separation from Lee and whether he considers his marriage to be an unconventional one, Hart is instantly and angrily rattled. He eventually suspends his campaign when he learns the Washington Post are about to run a piece about another, historical extra-marital relationship.
I’m not sure Jason Reitman intends it as such but a sequence in which Hart confronts the nitwit journalists in an alleyway outside his townhouse illustrates neatly the folly of his scorn for them. The trio may cower in the face of Hugh ‘Wolverine’ Jackman but they don’t go away: it’s Hart who ends up looking silly as he walks back to his house having failed to vanquish his contemptible foe. It is outrageous that someone of Hart’s calibre and integrity was thwarted like this when, nearly three decades later, the personally and professionally discredited Trump may have profited electorally from far worse behaviour. But there’s a different comparison to be drawn too: Bill (with the considerable help of Hillary) Clinton proved in 1992 that it was possible to turn alleged marital infidelity into something approaching political advantage. The media claimed that Hart’s relationship with Donna Rice raised questions about his judgment. Whether or not that was true, the arrogantly blinkered way in which he seems to have dealt with the muck-raking did raise such questions.
As the notably handsome and charismatic Gary Hart, Hugh Jackman might seem well cast. He doesn’t give a bad performance – and he does suggest a keen brain – but his super-impressive physique is a problem. Early on in the film, Hart’s team cringe as he prepares to take part in a campaign stunt: dressed in a lumberjack shirt and jeans, watched by a crowd, the candidate has to throw an axe at a target. He scores a bullseye and his team whoop with astonished relief. But no one could even imagine that Hugh Jackman, looking like the hero of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, might fail such a test. To be fair to him, Jackman may realise he’s too much of a film star for the role; perhaps that’s why, for the most part, he muffles his presence with the result that his Hart isn’t compelling enough as a public speaker and in front of a TV camera. Vera Farmiga and J K Simmons do what’s required of them with ease but that, in both cases, is frustratingly little.
17 January 2019
[1] Or words to that effect …
[2] The character of Parker, although technically fictional, is presumably based on the New York Times journalist E J Dionne, whose interview with him on the campaign trail quoted Hart, in response to rumours of womanising, as follows: ‘Follow me around. I don’t care. I’m serious. If anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead. They’ll be very bored.’ This last sentence, heard repeatedly in the film, is used by the Miami Herald as justification for spying on Hart.