Mike Nichols (1998)

It has its place in cinema history as just about the only Mike Nichols movie Pauline Kael ever liked; there was plenty of praise and several awards for Kathy Bates’s performance; but Primary Colors seemed to come and go surprisingly quietly.  The Lewinsky scandal was raging when the film was released in March 1998.  While that might have been thought a commercial advantage, it’s just as likely that American audiences took the view that a movie à clef didn’t compare with the real thing:  why pay at the box office when you could watch television news at no extra charge?  The book was adapted for the screen by Nichols’s erstwhile performing partner Elaine May (who, like Bates, was nominated for an Oscar).  Her script is full of sharp, amusing dialogue – how much May’s invention and how much taken from Joe Klein’s original, I don’t know.  The structure leaves something to be desired, though.  The film is too long (143 minutes) and Mike Nichols dwells for much too long on the investigation by Governor Stanton’s team into Fred Picker, his unexpected new rival for the Democratic nomination.  Sometimes I wasn’t sure the screenplay and direction developed enough changes of rhythm to express the shifting fortunes of the Stanton campaign but  Nichols deserves a lot of credit not only for what he gets out of the cast but for achieving something more difficult:  a comic tone that’s both sustained and supple.  While he’s most comfortable with the clearly satirical elements of the material, he handles its more ambiguous and unhappy aspects with sensitivity but without sentimentality.

John Travolta plays Jack Stanton wittily but his vocal impersonation of Clinton is a problem, not because it’s not accomplished – it is, very – but because it leads you to expect others to follow suit, and they don’t.  Travolta’s expert mimicry in effect turns Stanton’s wife Susan into Hillary but Emma Thompson makes no attempt to suggest the prototype.  It’s not just a matter of the voice.  The effortlessly attractive Thompson is at ease with herself physically – there’s little suggestion of  the insecurity you often used to sense in Hillary Clinton – an insecurity that made her push harder and appear more awkward.  (This seems to have lessened since she stopped being First Lady and became a politician in her own right.)  Deft and alert, Emma Thompson is also rather bland and Travolta, for all his charm, is lightweight:  there’s rarely the streak of iron that you always saw in Clinton through the bluff charm, and which you need in this character even if you think of him as Jack Stanton rather than Bill Clinton.  One thing that’s fascinating about Travolta, though:  when we see Stanton on a television screen, what comes through seems absolutely right.

Because of the two leads’ limitations, attention switches to the supporting players.  As the smart but naïve young campaign aide, Adrian Lester shows bags of skill and intelligence in a difficult part, and Nichols strikes pure gold with Kathy Bates and Billy Bob Thornton.   Thornton is very persuasive and extremely funny as the redneck political strategist Richard Jemmons, whose private life is a mess but whose professional instincts are super-acute.  Bates is Libby Holden, the Stantons’ longstanding ally who’s brought back onto the campaign to deal with attacks on Jack Stanton and divine what’s coming next to threaten his candidacy.  Elaine May gives Libby a great, foul-mouthed opening monologue which Bates delivers with wonderful verve.  With this character too, the tension between her political savvy and her psychological frailty is electrifying, even if the build-up to Libby’s tragic end is telegraphed by Nichols and May.  The fine cast also includes Larry Hagman as Picker and Allison Janney as a librarian – literally and excruciatingly falling over herself in her nervous excitement at meeting Governor Stanton.

23 September 2012