OVP: The Candidate (1972)

Film: The Candidate (1972)
Stars: Robert Redford, Peter Boyle, Melvyn Douglas, Don Porter
Director: Michael Ritchie
Oscar History: 2 nominations/1 win (Best Original Screenplay*, Sound)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

After a week off, we are back with more film reviews this week, and we're also going to return to an Oscars theme week.  For our 2005 OVP write-ups, we're going to be discussing the sound categories this week, and so I thought it would be fun to complement that with a collection of "Best Sound" Oscar nominations on the blog.  Every weekday this week we will be discussing an Oscar Sound nominee that I watched (or in one case, re-watched) for the first time during quarantine.  This will be the only thing that these films may have in common-we're going to discuss dramas, animation, musicals, and action films, but all of them were Oscar-blessed.  The first film of this bunch is going to be 1972's The Candidate, a movie that feels quite prescient when we look at what would happen in the ensuing years in terms of politics.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie centers around the campaign of one man running for office, and what happens when he suddenly becomes viable.  Marvin Lucas (Boyle), is a Democratic operative who needs to find someone to take on Republican Senator Crocker Jarmon (Porter).  No Democrats want to run against the popular Jarmon, so Lucas is looking for someone who can be a sacrificial lamb so that the bottom half of the ticket doesn't get blown out.  He recruits Bill McKay (Redford), the handsome son of former Gov. John McKay (Douglas), to run for the seat, and promises him that he can run on his own issues-since he's going to lose, he can be as progressive as he wants to be without issue.  However, when polling shows the younger McKay is going to lose in a landslide (thus hurting the bottom half of the ticket), McKay has to moderate his stances to help the party.

You see where this is going, right?  The platitudes and banality of McKay's message starts to resonate with the voters (alongside the fact that he looks like Robert Redford), and what was once a lost cause election suddenly becomes one where Bill has a chance to win.  McKay is forced to abandon his principled stand on key issues, and even begrudgingly speak to his estranged father.  When McKay nearly abandons his moderate platform by insisting the campaign discuss poverty & civil rights, the campaign is able to distract the media by having Bill's father show up at the debate, endorsing his son in the process & giving them a shiny object to keep the real issues of the campaign away.  McKay ends up winning the election, but realizes (there's a famous quote at the end of the movie where Redford states "what do we do now?" to Boyle's campaign manager with no answer in reply) that in the process of the campaign he has lost anything that made him authentic, thus winning without it meaning anything.

The film in many ways foreshadows the ugliness of politics in the modern era.  The scene where McKay's father endorses his son to keep the heat off of what his son actually said (what actually will matter to the voters), is particularly compelling in a week where a congressman called one of his colleagues a "bitch" but the focus from the media was more on whether he'd publicly apologize or not, not whether or not he is fit for public office after such an outburst (spoiler alert: he's not).  The movie was written by Jeremy Larner, who worked for the Eugene McCarthy campaign in 1968, and so therefore knows of what he speaks, and also was clearly issuing an indictment of the then-modern Democratic Party for picking a more palatable middle-of-the-road candidate (Hubert Humphrey) over the outsider (McCarthy) that he had championed.  The script is great, knowingly looking at politics (even if it rarely gives us much to go off of in terms of lead performances, though Redford is a smart casting decision as an "empty vessel" that everyone can project their dreams off of given his universal handsomeness & natural affability), and is that rare movie that ages beautifully (if depressingly).

The film's sound nomination, though, is weird.  The 1970's if you look at the Sound categories oftentimes did this with prestige films, nominating films that we wouldn't normally consider a "Sound" nomination today, but instead just a movie they liked.  The film doesn't sound bad, but it also reads like a normal political drama, with sound occasionally coming forward in the crowd or debate scenes (but that'd been done before so this wasn't a new thing), but most of the movie is conversation, standard-issue.  Therefore while it obviously fits our theme (it was nominated!), it's a weird fit, especially considering its competition (The Godfather, Cabaret, The Poseidon Adventure) is much more what we'd assume would show up in a production category like this.