Originally printed in the Los Angeles times in 1998. This article is extremely relevant to today’s current political climate.
Looks like little has changed huh?
Via Los Angeles Times:
“Primary Colors” is upon us, a $100-million cinematic wet blanket with as obvious a political agenda as any film Hollywood has ever produced. Joe Klein, author of the bitingly sardonic novel on which the movie is based, acknowledges the film is clearly softer on the Clintons–excuse me, the Stantons–than his original conception.
It’s no surprise that the president’s press boosters have seized on “Primary Colors” as the pop culture rationale and apologia for Bill Clinton, all making the point that Clintonism, warts and all, is as good as it gets. Forget the road not taken. But what director Mike Nichols, a Clinton friend, calls the movie’s defining moral dilemma is an utterly fraudulent conceit.
The setup is in keeping with the movie’s message that Clinton’s corruptions are more casual than profound. The candidate’s old friend and chief covert operative, played as a lovable lunatic by Kathy Bates, focuses only on controlling information about his womanizing.
She practically stumbles onto evidence of his chief opponent’s past cocaine addiction and dalliance with homosexuality. Frightfully depressed by the Bill and Hillary characters’ amusingly immediate decision to use the material to smear the other candidate–their only question is which newspaper to use–she kills herself. This shocks them into doing the right thing, which is to tell the opponent of the damaging information available on him, allowing him to gracefully withdraw.