The Front Runner (2018)

Film: The Front Runner (2018)
Stars: Hugh Jackman, Vera Farmiga, JK Simmons, Alfred Molina, Sara Paxton
Director: Jason Reitman
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

My friend Pat used to say that he couldn't watch tennis movies because he would over-analyze them since the actors never looked like how actual players perform on the court, which would take him out of the movie.  I have occasionally had a similar struggle when it comes to films about politics.  About ten minutes into The Front Runner, I had already rolled my eyes exasperatingly twice and was worried my wonkish political heart couldn't take such a spoon-fed tale of 1980's politics because I'd spend the movie mentally fact-checking (for the curious, the first, when Hugh Jackman's Gary Hary called Walter Mondale "Walter" rather than "Fritz," as he certainly would have called his former Senate colleague since that's what every politician who has ever spoken about Mondale called him, and the second was when they pretended that Alfred Molina's Ben Bradlee didn't know who Michael Dukakis was, as it's impossible to believe that Bradlee wouldn't have known the sitting Governor of Massachusetts, then in his fifth year in office).  But the film settled in, largely ignoring the other components of the race (the only 1988 opponents of Hart's mentioned more than once were Jesse Jackson and George Bush), and seemed to want to say a lot of things about the state of politics rather than getting into the minutia of the Hart campaign.  Being that Reitman is a capable director, this succeeds more than I expected (I went in with low expectations as someone who is not a fan of Jackman's at all), but I left not knowing entirely what the filmmaker's views were on the former Colorado senator, a man who may well have been a very good president if he had understood the tabloidization of politics was about to claim him as its first high-profile victim.

(Real Life Doesn't Have Spoiler Alerts) The film focuses, smartly, not on Hart's rise to fame but instead on the three weeks in 1987 where he went from being the Democratic frontrunner for the White House (and the most likely candidate to succeed President Reagan), to being a has-been, dropping out amid a sex scandal that had not been seen in politics until that point (at least publicly).  Jackman plays Hart as an intense, frequently awkward man, which feels true-to-form.  Hart doesn't really have a modern equivalent, but if you needed one it might be a younger, handsomer Bernie Sanders.  He had a liberal perspective that hadn't worked in the previous two campaigns for the White House against the Reagans, but America liked the guy and after the aging years of the Reagans, he represented a new foothold for youth in America.  As a Democrat, I consider him up there as one of the most frustrating figures in our party's history (of the last 50 years or so) mostly because his views as president stand as such a stark contrast to the president we eventually got, and it's hard to imagine what would have happened had President Hart been able to lead environmental, education, and economic policy for years (climate change likely looks like a lot different in this circumstance).  Jackman, as I mentioned, is not an actor I really like but isn't a bad choice for casting here, as his bland, traditional handsomeness combined with the rugged outdoorsman that Hart longed to project to differentiate himself from the decades older Ronald Reagan is a strong combination.

The film's problem, though, is that it cannot get a clear depiction of who Hart was, which might be the point, but that gets lost in delivery.  Is Hart a great leader that was brought down by his own libido, or was he a great man who was sacrificed as the news media focused more on salacious headlines than on substance?  The film doesn't really have an answer here; every time you see someone like Mamoudou Athie's young reporter asking his editor questions about the ethics of questioning Hart's extramarital life, you also see him asking similar questions to Hart, perhaps serving as a proxy for director Reitman, who cannot seem to gage what the appropriate reaction to Hart's behavior is.  The closest we get is Ari Graynor in a solid, small role as Ann Devroy saying that she doesn't trust a man who abuses his power to take advantage of women.

This is telling because Reitman, a straight white male serving as director and screenwriter, toes the line on the sexist angles of this story.  Donna Rice, played well by Sara Paxton, is given less to do and say (we don't really understand much about her relationship with Hart, as Jackman & Paxton almost never share the screen...anyone have a clue why that is as it feels odd?), but she delivers a fully-felt performance as a woman whose life is torn asunder by Hart's actions.  He gets to go on being a former senator, a major public figure repeatedly given the benefit of the doubt, but she...she just gets to be a slut.  There's a number of good scenes between her and Molly Ephraim as a campaign operative, but I think I was most struck by the thinly-veiled sexism of her interactions with JK Simmons as Hart's campaign manager.  He makes a polite but clear crack about what Hart's obvious interest in her would be, and she reads him with the passive anger of someone who has been dismissed her entire professional life because she's too beautiful to be smart.  She disappears the second the Hart campaign stops protecting her, and while that feels intentional, I would have liked more of her story.  I have to imagine that Reitman cut her from the ending credits where-are-they-now-section in part because her politics became deeply problematic which might mess with the sympathetic portrayal he attempted to give her (she became a major Trump supporter and was even posting conspiracy theories about Christine Blasey Ford during the Kavanaugh hearings), but unlike Hart, who he never gains a firm grasp on, Reitman clearly empathizes with Rice as a human being, and it feels like he's undoing the sexism of the affair by eliminating the need for her the second the Hart campaign does.

All-in-all, I figured I would loathe this movie, but I see its merits.  I'm going with a 2-star because Retiman's lack of a viewpoint on Hart feels too meandering to call this a "good" movie, but it's one worth discussing and has elements that could have made this much better.  The cast is good, the story feels pertinent, and he modernizes it without it feeling too "woke" for a story in 1987.  If I did halves, it'd be a 2.5, and if it's ever on cable, it's probably worth an investigation, even if it's nowhere near as good as some of Reitman's best films.