Butler's Cinema Scene

Hugh Jackman as Gary Hart

“THE FRONT RUNNER” My rating: B-

113 minutes | MPAA rating: R

It is easier to appreciate “The Front Runner” as a pivotal point in our political history than it is to warm up to it as a film.

The subject is Sen. Gary Hart’s 1988 run for the Democratic nomination for President,  the allegations of sexual impropriety that brought him down, and the media’s recognition (however reluctantly) that from here on out a candidate’s private life is fair game for coverage.

It’s been well acted and incisively directed by Jason Reitman (“Up in the Air,” “The Descendents”), yet even as it carefully lays out the parameters of the Hart affair “The Front Runner” seems remote and chilly. Perhaps there are no warm fuzzies in the film because there were no warm fuzzies in the true story.

Hart (Hugh Jackman) was a charismatic liberal with all the right responses. For those who swung left he hit the mark on race, economic disparity, the rapidly evaporating Cold War and other matters.  He might very well have made a great President, one who, according to an admirer, could “untangle the bullshit of politics so anyone can understand.”

Problem is, Hart was far easier to appreciate as a policy wonk than as an individual.  His marriage to Lee (Vera Farmiga) seemed solid — children, rustic home in the Colorado Rockies — but Hart bristled at any attempts to plum the depths of their relationship.  He insisted that the reporters covering him stick to the issues; his life behind the public image was off limits.

He wasn’t even on board with the usual photo ops, complaining that he was caught smiling “like some game show host.”

The screenplay by Reitman, Jay Carson and Matt Bai (on whose book it was based) runs on two parallel tracks.

There’s the insider workings of the Hart campaign, with an emphasis on tough-as-nails manager Bill Dixon (J.K. Simmons) and a host of young volunteers who see in Hart a politician who reflects their generational concerns.

Hugh Jackman, Vera Farmiga

On the other side are the members of the press corps, aware of rumors of Hart’s philandering but — sticking to a script written in the 1920s — maintaining a hands-off attitude toward a politician’s peccadilloes.

Especially there is the Miami Herald‘s Tom Fiedler (Steve Zissis), who receives an anonymous tip that the candidate is having an affair with a young woman he met on a Florida yacht cruise. The caller reports that Hart’s most recent squeeze is flying to Washington to spend the weekend with him.

Zissiz and the Herald’s management might have let that pass, except for Hart’s earlier outburst after a journalist asked the candidate  about his alleged womanizing. He dared the press to follow him, saying the reporters would be bored to death.

And that was the challenge that journalists couldn’t ignore.

Sara Paxton as Donna Rice

The Herald team followed a beautiful blond named Donna Rice (Sara Paxton) on a flight to D.C., tracked her to Hart’s townhouse and after a long stakeout confronted the Senator. From that point the Hart campaign began unravelling.

The film’s third act zags between the campaign’s frantic efforts at crisis control, Lee Hart’s furious response (she’d always known about her husband’s extramarital adventures but asked only that he never embarrass her), and the plight of Donna Rice, who pours out her fears to the Hart campaign aide (Molly Ephraim) who has been assigned to babysit her.

Curiously enough, Rice is the most sympathetic presence in the film, a young woman in way over her head.

By contrast, Jackman’s Hart is a hard guy to know, and a tougher one to like. His displays of righteous indignation at being stalked by the press seem real enough, but how much of that is the angry pouting of a privileged man who up to now has not been held accountable for his personal behavior?

The strongest element of “The Front Runner” may be the dead-on accuracy with which Reitman captures the behind-the-scenes camaraderie and competition of the press bus on the campaign trail.

| Robert W. Butler