The Front Runner review: Altman-esque political pastiche powered by Hugh Jackman's charm
Dir: Jason Reitman; Starring: Hugh Jackman, Vera Farmiga, JK Simmons, Mamoudou Athie, Steve Zissis, Sara Paxton, Alfred Molina. 15 cert, 113 mins.
For cinema-goers whose favourite part of a story is its moral, The Front Runner is an invitation to be driven round the twist. Jason Reitman’s new film covers the final three tumultuous weeks in a formerly silky smooth political campaign: the former US Senator Gary Hart’s drive to become the 1988 Democratic presidential nominee. The married father of two, deftly played by Hugh Jackman, withdrew his candidacy after being caught on a yacht called ‘Monkey Business’ with a 29-year-old blonde – though not before furiously arguing that the incident had no bearing on his political competence.
Did it? Arguably no – though his response, which was by turns indignant, supercilious and evasive, almost certainly did. Did the media trash a worthwhile candidate in pursuit of a tantalising scoop? Maybe so. But was their scoop legitimate? Almost certainly, yes. As cautionary tales go, The Front Runner is of an unusually cautious bent. It presents the evidence, then sits back and folds its arms.
One thing is unambiguous, though: that the film sees Hart’s downfall as a turning point, both for American politics and the media that covered it. (It was adapted from the nonfiction book All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid by Matt Bai, who wrote the screenplay with Reitman and Jay Carson.) Accordingly, Reitman borrows the look, sound and feel of one of the great American turning point films: Nashville, Robert Altman’s 1975 masterpiece about the US’s hapless attempts to regain its bearings after Vietnam, JFK and Watergate.
Every tic and quirk from the Altman stylebook is here, from long takes and roving camerawork to the swarm of a supporting cast and dialogue that melts into the general hubbub. In Reitman’s hands, it’s essentially pastiche – his previous films, which include Juno and Up in the Air, are nothing like this – but it’s a good one, and effectively captures the knife-edge bustle of political stagecraft.
It is the kind of film that might have been promoted years ago with one of those Jack Davis cartoon posters with the outsize caricatured heads, perhaps showing a crowd of journalists, spin doctors and other assorted hangers-on chasing after Jackman, who would be running along with his trousers round his ankles.
Most of the supporting roles are glorified bit parts, and the actors who embrace that are the ones who thrive. JK Simmons is terrific fun as Hart’s brusque campaign manager Bill Dixon, as is Alfred Molina as Ben Bradlee, the Washington Post editor played by Tom Hank in Steven Spielberg’s The Post. And Molly Ephraim does some engaging ethical grappling as the Hart staffer charged with ‘managing’ Donna Rice (Sara Paxton), the girl from the yacht.
As Hart’s wife Lee, Vera Farmiga is poorly served by the script, which gives her just one pained-but-dignified note to play, but there is a juicier part for The Get Down’s Mamoudou Athie as a young Washington Post journalist whose admiration for Hart clashes with his resolve to see the story though. And Jackman is rather good too, detonating little flashes of hubris and deploying his natural charm in interesting ways.
There is a thrill in watching his Hart lose a room then win it back again, or embark on some ill-advised publicity stunt like an axe-throwing contest, only for it to pay off. Moments like this suggest Reitman has hauled himself out of the long creative slump that began with 2013’s Labor Day – though as throwback media procedurals go, this feels considerably less pressing than Steven Spielberg’s The Post.
It is a newsroom that plays host to one of The Front Runner’s most quietly telling scenes. Early in the film, long before the yacht scandal breaks, a reporter at the Miami Herald is given just 100 words to cover Hart’s campaign launch, while the plum slots are set aside for the “Mickey Desk” – the team covering the activities of the Walt Disney Company and their holiday resort up the coast. Perhaps becoming a Mickey Mouse operation itself was the only way for politics to compete.
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