Clinton Without Contrasts

If ever there was an op-ed movie -- a movie destined to be written about in an "elevated" realm beyond just the movie pages -- it's Primary Colors. Thanks to Monica Lewinsky and Paula Jones, the Hollywood/Washington nexus has lifted this new Mike Nichols picture, based on the 1996 bestseller by Joe Klein, into a higher stratosphere than it deserves. In much the same way that people mistook the "importance" of the movie All the President's Men for the importance of the actual events at its source, Primary Colors is being puffed by circumstance. We are told in interview after interview, on TV and in the papers and slick magazines (including a Time cover), that Primary Colors is about "honor." But clear away all this state-of-the-Union blather and what Primary Colors is really about is the itch of office. What it's saying is: Our greatest presidents have jumbo libidos and it's not an aberration, it's an integral part of who they are. You can't have one without the other. Get used to it.

Klein's novel, authored as "Anonymous" and published in February of 1996, was a sharp, quick read -- the work of a political reporter (New York, Newsweek and currently The New Yorker) who knew the intimacies of Clinton's Democratic Primary campaign in 1992 and made his readers feel like insiders. It's a roman a clef written by an outraged idealist but, because Klein -- whose identity as the author was finally uncovered last year -- brings his ambivalence about the quasi-Clinton character Governor Jack Stanton right into the mix, the book seems closer to our own conflicted feelings about politicians than the usual black-and-white portrayals of standard political pulp.

The movie of Primary Colors, which was scripted by Elaine May, tries to be both wised-up and idealistic. It's at its best when it's just on the cusp of lampoon. But clearly Nichols and May are aiming "higher." Hollywood has a habit of mucking up comedy with civic-minded goo, and at about the halfway point in Primary Colors, the goo takes over. This is the stuff that will get the movie on the op-ed pages, but it doesn't do much for us.

In a way, I suspect most audiences watching Primary Colors will be way ahead of it -- not just in terms of the latest twists and turns in the Clinton-o-rama but also in terms of their own moral savvy. After all, it's already been established that a large chunk of the American public could care less if Clinton has a well-oiled zipper, as long as the economy is improving, crime is down, yadda yadda yadda. Because of its time lag in getting to the screen, Primary Colors seems dated not so much because of its plot as because of its attitudes. It's preaching to the converted -- or at least to the uninterested.

The film is refracted through the eyes of the author's surrogate, Henry Burton (the British stage actor Adrian Lester), a black congressional aide whose grandfather was a civil rights icon. Wooed by Jack Stanton, the governor of an unnamed Southern state who is lagging in the Democratic presidential primaries, Henry warily joins up and becomes a true believer.

He's a potentially fascinating character -- the post-boomer political idealist. In an exchange with Susan Stanton (Emma Thompson), the president's wife, he says to her, "You had Kennedy. I want to be part of something that is history." Henry allows himself to be mesmerized by Stanton because he recognizes the good he is trying to accomplish. As the governor's serial sex scandals pile up, and the dirty tricks, he finds it increasingly difficult to remain enraptured, but he also comes of age. Henry isn't just the author's surrogate; he's ours, too. And his rite of passage is presented as a coming-of-age parable -- he becomes an adult when he understands his heroes have clay feet.

Henry's counterpart is Libby Holden (Kathy Bates), the governor's confidante and political troubleshooter, who once worked for McGovern and still has her counterculture credentials and her brass. She's the outraged idealist as '60s survivor. Beneath all her bluster is an innocence to match Henry's -- she wants to work with someone who really cares. That's why she and Henry become soul mates.

But Henry, although well played by Lester, doesn't occupy the movie's center. He's too blandly "symbolic" a character to take hold of our imagination; he represents the losing of an innocence we already lost. Instead the center, if it exists at all, belongs to Stanton. Travolta has chosen to play him with marked Clinton drawl and body language, and the result is a charming, eerie weightlessness (even though Travolta added 20 pounds for the role). By making the Clinton-Stanton connection so obvious, the performance takes on the trappings of revue-sketch impersonation. Stanton is a cartoon, a cartoon who feels pain and wants to help people. This is a promising touch: Because politics can hollow out even the best of politicians, maybe all we can expect from them is a kind of deeply felt charade. The shimmering unreality of Jack Stanton in Primary Colors makes more psychological sense than we might care to admit.