RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American politician fights back against ravenous press in Reitman’s new film
The story of American Sen. Gary Hart’s fall from grace isn’t that old — just four presidents ago, on the eve of the election cycle that gave the U.S. its first Bush commander in chief. But the 1987 scandal feels almost Elizabethan, given that it took place before the digital age at a time when the internet was just a network of a few thousand computers, mostly in education and the military.
Hugh Jackman plays Hart from beneath a mop of mousey hair and wearing the widecollared shirts favoured at the time. Director and co-writer Jason Reitman reminds us in the opening scenes that Hart lost the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 to Walter Mondale, remarking phlegmatically: “Now they know who we are.”
Cut to 1987, and scenes of the Colorado senator doing very well in the run-up to the nomination. He has a dedicated, impassioned staff headed up by J.K. Simmons, and a style of speech that is simple without being simplistic. He’s a smart debater.
He is also, the press corps whispers, a “womanizer.” Even the term seems dated in an age when the current president is being accused of campaignfinance violations for paying off multiple women with whom he had affairs.
But 1987 was a different era, and one poised on the cusp between Then and Now. Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee (Alfred Molina in this film; Tom Hanks in last year’s The Post) recalls how LBJ had once asked the papers to give him the same “courtesy” in his private life as they had JFK. “And we did.”
Things change when reporters get news that Hart, who had twice been separated from his wife ( Vera Farmiga), is dating someone named Donna Rice (Sara Paxton). The politician offhandedly invites the press to “Follow me around ... If anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead. They’ll be very bored.” They did, and they weren’t. And although the evidence was pretty flimsy — a woman entered his apartment late at night, and might have left by an unseen back entrance — it was enough to ignite a controversy.
THE FRONT RUNNER
★★★ 1/2outof5
Cast: Hugh Jackman, Vera Farmiga, Sara Paxton
Director: Jason Reitman
Duration: 1 h 53 m
Hart didn’t help matters by refusing to engage with the rumours. “I care about the sanctity of this process,” he hollers at one point, meaning political and journalistic procedures, neither of which he thinks has anything to do with his personal life. But the press continues to hammer away at him, including a sympathetic journalist (Mamoudou Athie) who nonetheless asks him point-blank: “Have you ever committed adultery?”
Reitman’s telling, based on the book All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid by Matt Bai, stops short of being an apologia for Hart, though it is clearly in the Senator’s corner. And it provides an instructive how-did-we-get-here tale, looking at how media intrusion, once started, and whether for good or ill, is difficult to rein in.
Jackman does his usual fine work in a less-than-showy role compared to his recent turns as P.T. Barnum and Wolverine. And Farmiga holds her own in a minor part as the politician’s wife, making the most of a couple of strong scenes.
“The one thing I asked is that you don’t embarrass me,” she tells her husband at one point, suggesting a wealth of unstated understandings. And later: “These people want to feel outrage for me, but it doesn’t belong to them.”
There’s a fascinating footnote to Hart’s career not mentioned in the film. Under Bill Clinton’s presidency, Hart served on a commission studying national security. At a speech in Montreal, he predicted that “for the first time since 1812, Americans will lose their lives in large number on American soil by terrorists using weapons of mass destruction.”
In the aftermath of such an attack, “We will be spied on, our privacy will be gone; that will have a huge impact on our society.” He was speaking to a group of aviation lawyers.
The date was Sept. 4, 2001.