Checked out the new excitement over the weekend… the Gary Hart movie The Front Runner. Such excitement. Such wow. So thrilling I kept on putting off posting about it. I guess going in, I knew the movie was about one thing… the reason Gary Hart didn’t become the Democratic nominee in 1988. And the movie does nothing to add to that nor does it do anything to make that more scintillating.
The movie is about Gary Hart, the (unconfirmed in the film) affair with Donna Rice, whether reputable newspapers should report on extra marital affairs, and how his campaign imploded. Hugh Jackman plays Gary Hart… not the perfect casting. I guess he does a good job based on my “no memory” of what Gary Hart was like.
There are perfectly good movies about politics and the press that crackle with energy, paranoia, and ethics so there’s no reason this movie couldn’t have been better. But it wasn’t. It was dry, overly long, and with low to almost no energy. Sometimes the ethics of whether the press should get involved in an affair are kind of interesting. There’s something largely unstated about the Old Boy’s Network where the press would look away when JFK had misstresses (and how LBJ demanded the same treatment of his affairs).
Whether this is right or wrong is left to the audience to decide (and to ponder how things changed or stayed the same come Clinton… and later Trump). In some respects, that’s good… for a documentary. For a drama, it’s kind of tepid and dull.
This was a pretty bad movie as drama goes. It provides a little detail about a footnote-with-implications in American history… but it took too long to do it and was just limp and boring. I’m sure there’s a good documentary about this subject.
Score: 59