‘Runner’ has Hart and heft
Jackman’s finest hour as scandal pol
MOVIE REVIEW THE FRONT RUNNER Election fray. ★★★ ½ Running time: 112 minutes. Rated R (for language and sexual references). Now playing.
WHEN asked if his newspaper should dig deeper into the alleged extra-marital affair of 1988 presidential hopeful Gary Hart in the new movie “The Front Runner,” The Washington Post’s then-editor-in-chief Ben Bradlee (Alfred Molina) says, “We’d have to expel half the Senate!”
The newsroom cronies also joke about turning a blind eye to President Lyndon Johnson’s womanizing, and Bradlee’s close friendship with serial philanderer John F. Kennedy is now well-known. The very good “Front Runner,” which stars Hugh Jackman in his finest performance ever, as Hart, is about the watershed moment when politicians’ personal lives became fair game for serious reporters — and whether or not they should have.
At the relatively young age of 50, Hart was the rising star of the Democratic Party, thanks to his blend of smarts, charm and straightforward speaking style.
But his campaign to replace outgoing President Ronald Reagan was brought down in just three weeks, when the married Hart posed for a photo on a boat in Miami hilariously called Monkeyy Business with a woman named Donna Rice docked on his lap.
Rice (Sara Paxton, human and hurt- ing) then flew out to DC with a friend to visit Hart, and was spotted coming and going from his town house during a stakeout by Miami Herald reporters, who were tipped off to an “affair.” HHart and Rice have always dedenied in vague terms that they had sex, although Hart did later come clean to cheating on his wife during their marriage. RRice, who had no political experience, claimed she was applying for a job on the Hart cam- paign.
In the movie, when asked why she wanted to join the team, Rice replies, “I like his positions.”
The scandal rocked Washington and became fodder for Johnny Carson. Hart’s presidential ambitions were dead.
Director Jason Reitman’s swiftmoving film is built for heated conversations. Does the media intrude too much into politicians’ personal lives? Is the president’s sex life any of our business? Such questions are all the more thought-provoking in the midst of the #MeToo movement. As society questions the behavior of powerful men, sexual and otherwise, can the left still argue that the evasive Hart was treated unfairly by the press? Didn’t centuries of shrugging get us into this mess?
That last idea is driven home forcefully by three women in the film — a campaign aide, a Washington Post reporter and Hart’s wife, Lee (a sublime Vera Farmiga) — who just want to trust and believe this man as he gives them fewer and fewer reasons to.
As Hart, Jackman trades singin’ and slashin’ for plain talk. It’s a deft performance in which Jackman commits to Hart’s moral flaws — but loudly asserts that he’s a good guy and that his private life is strictly off-limits.
Jackman’s turn doesn’t have an Oscars wow quality; nor does the movie itself. The script’s zingers can occasionally come off as storebrand “West Wing.” But it’s a fun, endlessly fascinating watch in which the big questions outweigh the tiny problem.