The Front Runner *** (2018, Hugh Jackman, Vera Farmiga, J K Simmons, Kaitlyn Dever, Sara Paxton, Alfred Molina) – Movie Review

American Senator Gary Hart was an idiot. At the crucial climax to his 1988 presidential campaign in which he is The Front Runner, the newspapers (The Miami Herald) catch him (after a tip-off) in an extra-marital love affair with a young woman he meets on board a boat unfortunately called Monkey Business. He has just challenged the guy from The Washington Post to follow him if he doesn’t believe that he is faithful.

Gary Hart was also a charismatic idiot. And Hugh Jackman plays him charismatically, a little cocky, a little arrogant, a lot charming, with great hair and great suits, and a great manner. Jackman is The Front Runner. Hart seriously thought that a politician’s private life was private, didn’t matter, only his policies. Extra-marital stuff didn’t affect his credibility as a US President. Hart was a little cocky, and a little deluded.

Gary Hart was also a good politician, possibly even a good man. How easy it can be for the mighty to be fallen, especially if the press have their dirty knives out. Vera Farmiga plays his long-suffering wife Lee Hart, and J J Simmons plays his campaign manager, Bill Dixon. Both are excellent at the head of a top cast.

The Front Runner tells a now little-remembered story, and tells it fluently and well. But the reason it is little-remembered is that it is a little story, just another sex scandal involving a high-profile politician. Director Jason Reitman keeps the film crackling along, with convincing period atmosphere – the phones, the cars, the hairstyles! – a good soundtrack and endlessly roving camerawork.

Just as Jackman is Australian but you do believe in him as Gary Hart, so you believe in Reitman’s re-creations of scenes and events and characters of 30 years ago. It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it. It is all in the skill. It is all in the style.

The story itself is desperately sad and depressing. It is not at all a feel-good movie. You leave the cinema feeling bad. Reitman tells the story straight, if often probably more amusingly and wittily than it was at the time. Actually, the movie is often quite funny, unexpectedly so. Reitman is entertaining us.

But, after telling the story straight, he then leaves us to our own conclusions as to who is the bad guy – the sinning politician or the sensationalist media. That is the gutter press, the posh press and the TV. They are all the same now, the film says.

It would have been nicer, if of course hugely less subtle, to know who Reitman is gunning for. Maybe everybody, everybody that is apart from the politician’s hard-working campaign team who are all out of work thanks to their boss’s idiocy. Couldn’t he just have left it alone for a couple of weeks till he actually got elected?

The film also has sympathy for the women in the case, the wife and daughter (Kaitlyn Dever) obviously, but also the other woman in question – Donna Rice (Sara Paxton), who is given screen time to be understood.

Maybe this is an odd role post-Wolverine for Jackman, but it is a good one, an effective showcase for his acting talents in an interesting, thoughtful, involving and intelligent, if small movie. Most importantly, Reitman makes a strong, urgent case for The Front Runner not being yesterday’s news. Hold the front page!

Thirty years on, however, it seems the American public is willing to put up with politicians with flaws and bad hair. Most everything else is the same though, except worse. And now we’ve got cell phones so people can text incessantly in cinemas instead of watching the movie.

Credit where credit is due: the writers of the screenplay are Matt Bai, Jay Carson and Jason Reitman, based on the book All The Truth Is Out by Matt Bai.

Alfred Molina plays The Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, who was played by Jason Robards Jr in All the President’s Men.

The Front Runner was screened on 14 October 2018 at the BFI London Film Festival.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Movie Review

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