’80s political thriller can’t top Trump
The Front Runner
K (out of 4) Starring Hugh Jackman, Sara Paxton, Vera Farmiga, J.K. Simmons and Mamoudou Athie. Written by Matt Bai, Jay Carson and Jason Reitman. Directed by Jason Reitman. Opens Friday at the Varsity. 113 minutes. 14A Was there really ever a time when people were shocked by philandering politicians?
Or when pols could seriously claim that their private affairs were above public scrutiny?
In these Trumpian days of shock-a-minute presidential peccadillos, Jason Reitman’s dramatic recreation of Gary Hart’s 1988 flameout as a leading White House contender, thanks to his dallying aboard the bad ship Monkey Business with ex-model Donna Rice (Sara Paxton), might seem like the quaintest of fairy tales. But with Hugh Jackman strongly conjuring the Colorado senator’s fatal blend of idealism, naivety and arrogance, the story instead presents itself as the moment in recent history when the press and public alike stopped turning a blind eye to the private transgressions of public people and started going for the jugular, for better and for worse.
Journalists aren’t presented as heroically as they’ve been in such films as All the President’s Men and The Post.
Reporters for the Miami Herald and other newspapers who stalked and interrogated Hart are viewed more as gossipmon- gers than truth-tellers.
Reitman wrote the screenplay with Matt Bai and Jay Carson, based on Bai’s book All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid.
Vera Farmiga plays Hart’s wife Lee, brilliantly bringing home in just a few scenes the personal cost of a spouse’s betrayal.
Yet it all seems pretty tame when set against the daily outrages perpetrated by Donald Trump against his family, his country and the world.