Primary Colors (1998)
Director: Mike Nichols Cast: John Travolta, Emma Thompson, Adrian Lester, Billy Bob Thornton, Maura Tierney, Kathy Bates, Larry Hagman Screenplay: Elaine May Producers: Runtime: US Distribution: Universal Rated R: Language, sexual references
By Nathaniel R. Atcheson (nate@pyramid.net)
I don't care whether or not Jack Stanton, the character portrayed by John Travolta in Primary Colors, is supposed to be Bill Clinton. I've read that he is, but it doesn't really matter. I certainly don't care about the book written by "Anonymous" (supposedly the author is ex-Newsweek writer Joe Klein).
I think the entire situation is intensely silly. If someone is going to make a semi-biography about how our President got to where he is, why not just do that? Why all this secrecy? Oh, I suppose that Clinton wouldn't like a film to be made about him while he's still in office. Maybe this is just an easy way to tell the story without dealing with whatever legal boundaries that needed to be crossed.
In any event, this conspiracy stuff didn't give me a positive outlook on Primary Colors before seeing it, although I expected to enjoy the film. But I didn't. This film is profoundly uninteresting and feigned. It's phony in almost every scene, and painfully artificial in each second of dialogue spewed out of Travolta's mushy, distracting, Clinton-spoofing voice. I despised almost every moment of this film, and not necessarily because of Elaine May's script, but because of the execution: director Mike Nichols fails on a fundamental level to explain the point of his film. Is it an Intelligent and Cynical satire? Is it supposed to be a realistic account of how political campaigns work? Is it intended as a character study of Bill Clinton?
I don't know, and because Nichols goes in so many different directions, the film is ultimately reduced to a soup of scenes that clash because of their strikingly varied tones. Some of these scenes work alone, but many don't, and none of them work herded together in this disaster. This fact is not enhanced by the heinous, radically annoying performance by John Travolta, a performance that has permanently made me cautious of any film in which he may appear in the future.
The film is about Governor Stanton's efforts to win the Democratic nomination for the Presidential race. The story is told through the eyes of Henry Burton (Adrian Lester), a young, ambitious man who is recruited by Stanton and his wife, Susan (Emma Thompson), to manage a large part of the campaign. Henry believes that he's working for a great man, and his loyalty is tested through numerous trials, most of which involve accusations that Stanton sleeps around at every given chance. A subplot, which becomes the focus towards the end, involves Kathy Bates as Libby Holden, an old friend of the Stantons who is hired to see what kind of dirt the press is going to be able to dig up on them.
Much of the film is supposedly about the relationship between Stanton and his wife. The relationship the audience gets to see is about as watered-down as the relationship the American public sees between Bill and Hilary Clinton. Every intimate discussion, each moment when there might be a word that isn't politics-related, is absent from this film. This is clearly intentional on Nichols' part, because I imagine he's trying to imitate, to an extent, the kind of view we have of the President and his personal life.
This isn't to say that we see nothing of his personal life, because we do. We see that he gets "upset" when his wife finds out that he probably had sex with a teenage girl (does anyone else find the thought of this action deplorable?); similar reserved displays of emotion are scattered throughout the film, but none of them paint a picture any more-defined than the one we all have of Clinton. Perhaps, if the point of the film is specifically to document the details of a political campaign, then my qualms with the handling of Stanton's character would be invalid. But if the point is just to show the campaign, then why go to all the trouble to make Stanton a replica of Clinton?
I'm not a fan of Clinton myself, but that's irrelevant. Every single scene that features Travolta--with the exception of none--is totally plastic and insincere. I didn't believe a word he said at any point during the film. When he gives his speeches to the uneducated masses (apparently, the majority of the American public can not read and continuously get fired from their factory jobs), each word Travolta utters singed my nerves in a way no performance ever has. Clinton himself does not irritate me the way Travolta does in this film. When Travolta has scenes with Thompson, I feel like he's lying to her. When he's supposed to be "frank" and "honest" with the people around him, I still feel like he's lying.
And again, if Nichols' point is to satirize the way we all think politicians constantly lie, then hats off to him. But he's created a character and a situation, both of which we are clearly intended to care about, and we do not, because 1) we don't know the guy, and 2) he irritates us. It simply doesn't work.
In addition, many of the scenes in the film are frustrating and peripheral to the story. Billy Bob Thornton, for instance, plays a character named Richard Jemmons who has nothing to do with the film, and provides only a few scenes that develop his own pointless character. And the subplot involving Bates' character ends predictably--this entire portion of the film, which is inserted to show the potential viciousness of the Stantons, is routinely manipulative, and serves simply as somewhere to end the film.
Whatever minimal points I obligingly and generously give this film go to the other actors: Thompson is wonderful, and not given enough screen time; Lester is also very good, and plays his part convincingly; and Bates is charismatic as always. None of these actors can escape the shadow of Travolta's tremendously wretched mockery of Clinton, however.
I've heard that to criticize a film is to create a new one, but I can't think of what might have made Primary Colors acceptable, or even watchable, for that matter. Wag the Dog, which was another political film that I didn't enjoy, was at least consistent and thorough in its endeavors. Primary Colors wants to be intelligent and insightful, and maybe it is when it comes to politics. But it has so much extra stuff for us to consider that it leaves us battered and confused as to what it's trying to prove. Films this inept and incoherent should be illegal.
1/2* out of **** (1/10, F)
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Nathaniel R. Atcheson
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