Giving slime the soft sell
Primary Colors
Directed by Mike Nichols
With Adrian Lester, John Travolta, Emma Thompson, Kathy Bates and Billy Bob Thornton
By Norm Dixon
If you can manage it, avoid seeing Wag the Dog until you've seen Primary Colors. Watched back to back, they subvert Primary Colors' makers' subtle attempt to convince us that election campaign dishonesty, hypocrisy, compromised principles, dirty tricks and corruption are necessary evils if "reformers" are to win office. While Primary Colors asks if opportunism and duplicity has a place in gaining office, Wag the Dog answers by showing just where it leads once in office.
Primary Colors is based on newspaper columnist Joe Klein's thinly fictionalised account of Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign to be the Democratic Party's presidential candidate.
The book was published in 1994, its author a secret. While those in the Clinton camp fell over themselves to deny the book was about their chief and his antics, it was close enough to reality for most to believe it could only have been written by a disloyal insider with intimate knowledge of the events.
Almost every character in the book had an easily recognisable real-life equivalent. Incidents, while different in detail and somewhat exaggerated, resembled actual events, some known only to Clinton's inner circle of minders and fixers.
The movie holds true to the book, although somewhat sweetened. And while everybody associated with the film publicly states it is not about Bill and Hillary Clinton, the fact that John Travolta and Emma Thompson have obviously gone to such great lengths to mimic them, right down to hair colour and accents, says something different.
Primary Colors is the Faustian tale of young, liberal buppie Henry Burton (Lester), who deserts the staff of a black congressman and is swept up in the campaign of Jack Stanton (Travolta), the governor of "a small southern state", in the 1992 Democratic Party primaries. Burton, the well-heeled, well-educated grandson of a famous civil rights leader, is frustrated at the slow pace of change for African Americans. Perhaps backing Stanton is a better option, he thinks.
Once on board, Burton finds his role is to sell, not progressive policies, but the politician's personality and image. He rationalises that it is better to play the vacuous game of electoral politics in the short term, allowing Stanton to remain vague and contradictory on his political stances, while capitalising on his ability to convince people (by turning on the charm and warmth) that he "cares for the folks". Once elected, Burton thinks, principled policies can take centre stage.
Jack and Susan Stanton (Thompson) are a political team as much as, if not more than, a married couple. He provides the charisma, she the strategic thinking. Burton, Susan Stanton, opportunist spin doctor/adviser Richard Jemmons (Thornton), and left-leaning 1960s hold-out Libby Holden (Bates) find they must increasingly spend their time defusing crises caused by Governor Stanton's past and present amorous adventures. Burton even finds himself bribing the father of a pregnant 17-year-old to keep quiet.
As principles increasingly take second place to opportunism and dishonesty, Burton and Holden are dispatched to find some dirt on a "Mr Clean" opponent. They discover the opponent has a secret life, but agree that it would be wrong to use what they know against him. The Stantons have no such qualms.
Holden, who has stuck with the Stantons through thick and thin in the belief that they remain true to their radical ideals of the 1960s, has her illusions tragically shattered. Burton, too, must choose which path he will take.
Director Nichols' film is openly sympathetic to the compromises the Stantons make in their climb to power. His Clintonesque character is a flawed but benevolent leader with a common touch.
At one point, Stanton asks Burton what alternative is there to supporting his campaign, the Republicans? (The film conveniently disposes of characters who could express an alternative, like Burton's friend, a journalist on a radical black newspaper). Nichols wants his audience to understand, even accept, that the ends justify the means if a reformist is to be elected in the US. Yet, beyond being a "good guy", Nichols does not have Stanton propose any clear reforms beyond support for adult literacy and better health care. The end, it seems, is simply to have a "good guy" elected.
The real record of Clinton is instructive. Like Burton and Holden, many on the US left supported Clinton as the "lesser evil". Clinton made vague noises about improved welfare and health services. What they got was a president that has introduced the most severe anti-welfare measures in history and brought the US to the brink of war in Iraq.
It is this record that will probably mean that Nichols' will not succeed. A recent survey found that more people in the US were prepared to believe that their government was hiding the existence of UFOs (80%) than that politicians put people's needs ahead of their own (37%). Most movie-goers will fail to see that lying and cheating is all right in some circumstances, but only that politicians lie and cheat.
Whatever the film-makers intentions, the lesson to be drawn from Primary Colors is not that there is no alternative to corrupt capitalist politics, but rather that an alternative has to be urgently built.