A-List: Top Five Election-Themed Movies
By J. Don Birnam
March 31, 2016
BoxOfficeProphets.com
The rules for this edition of the A-List are a tad difficult to draw with exactitude. Some movies are more about the political system than elections. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, for example, perhaps one of the best government-themed movies of all time, does not really feature any campaigning or an election. The same goes for other amazing movies about politics, from All The President’s Men to the Oscar winner All The King’s Men. Other movies, say, Dave, feature an election in the background, but really are about the President himself. (Or, that may be a bit too kind to Dave, which is really just a rom-com in the Oval Office). The trick, then, is to find movies that are about running for office.
Since the list of those is not necessarily very long (but, if I missed one, be sure to tweet me about it!), I am going to add movies that feature elections for things other than presidential races. So, Legally Blonde, full with Elle Wood’s run for class president, is in. Alas, we will be speaking about another Reese Witherspoon soon, as you may suspect.
Before we get to the top five, I have to give some dishonorable mentions. The Ides of March, the Oscar-touted George Clooney/Ryan Gosling movie from a few years back, is a pet-peeve hated movie of mine. Okay, I get it, this year’s primary shows that crazy stuff can happen, but have we gotten to the point of murder and extortion of that kind? I guess the answer is yes if you believe the House of Cards model, but come on. When a movie passes itself for serious and features non-serious themes, it is bad by definition. The other dishonorable mention is the election-themed movie from last year that I just caught up with, Sandra Bullock’s Our Brand is Crisis. Why Bullock or the movie got a single “z” of Oscar buzz is beyond me. The movie is not worth a DVD viewing.
My only honorable mention is the devilish and stunning The Contender, starring a superb Joan Allen as she jockeys to be appointed Vice-President after the position becomes open. The cynicism of politics hasn’t been expressed as effectively perhaps since Jimmy Stewart did it as Mr. Smith, but like with Mr. Smith Went to Washington, Allen is not technically speaking running a political campaign. Accordingly, the movie, good as it is, is not eligible.
On to the results of our straw poll.
5. Primary Colors (1998)
If Mike Nichols directs a movie about current themes, you know it is going to be a good one. But when he tackled a charming, Southern Governor Democrat running for President, and the sexual scandals that could have accosted his candidacy, all about three months before the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke…well…time has a way of helping some movies become a classic.
Do not discount, of course, Travolta’s charming drawl as the popular Governor, in perhaps his last best role. Let’s not forget Emma Thompson’s reliably strong turn as the reliably strong wife of the candidate who, all of Thompson’s denials notwithstanding, was an astoundingly precise prediction of the person Hillary Clinton would become. And how can one overlook the strong Kathy Bates in one of her Oscar-nominated performances, as the unstable and depressive consultant hired by Travolta’s character to fend off potential allegations against the candidate.
I do realize that I began this column by criticizing the exaggerated plot points behind The Ides of March and that Primary Colors features it all, from suicides to paternity tests to heart attacks. There will always be a degree of exaggeration when it comes to political movies, however. It is Primary Colors’ ability to make it seem as if it all could happen in one election cycle - and its timeliness both because of the sexual scandals of when it was released and the wackiness of this race - that make it a memorable election movie.
4. The Candidate (1972)
Before we had Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, there was a populist who could speak his mind and appeal to mass audiences, and it was Robert Redford’s The Candidate.
Tapped by operatives to run a losing race against an incumbent Republican Senator in California, Redford begins to rise steadily in the polls almost against his will through a series of gaffes, honest moments, and familiar encounters. Before the movie Bulworth, about a depressed candidate who ran his mouth and thus gained popularity, ended Warren Beatty’s directorial career, we had the movie The Candidate to tell us the story of the ingénue who unwittingly joins the nasty world of politics.
Sure, there are many movies of this type, from Mr. Smith to Bulworth to Hal Ashby’s Being There. But what works well in The Candidate, perhaps better than in those movies, is that its comedic tone is light enough and combined well enough with its seriousness as to serve as an allegory for the candidate’s (lowercase) evolution itself. At first a joke, the realization of the seriousness of his position dawns on him as the election runs its course. In that way, the movie reminds us sternly that, even for those who had lost hope, the political system is not to be taken too lightly. Too much is at stake.
3. Wag The Dog (1997)
What one of my favorite movies ever, Network, did for journalism and TV, Wag the Dog arguably does for political coverage of presidential campaigns. It’s not that simply that Wag the Dog has the cynicism of Chayefsky’s masterpiece - that is arguably easy to do and trite at this point - it’s that Wag the Dog presages the evolution of the medium from 1997 on as Network did in its own time.
Wag the Dog tells the story of a cunning political operative, played by Robert De Niro, who hires a Hollywood producer, Dustin Hoffman, to create a diversionary war that will distract the media’s interest from surfacing rumors of the President’s love affairs. The President is running for reelection, so the scheme is essentially part of the campaign.
Given that, as you’d expect, the deception is successful, Wag the Dog is essentially a satire of how complicit the media is willing to be to scandal and smut in order to gain ratings at the expense of actual news coverage. As an augur of Fox News and MSNBC, that is pretty impressive, let alone of the obsessive media attention given in recent years to theater-like candidates from Sarah Palin to Trump himself.
Okay, so the movie does feature a staged murder a la the now-smeared Ides of March. What can I say? Like a good politician, I used that line against the movie when it suited me, but I have now seen fit to change my tune.
2. Election (1999)
It turns out that the late 1990s were the heyday for election-themed movies, with the third appearance on this list being in the number two spot, for the movie that put Alexander Payne (Nebraska, The Descendants) on the map.
And what is even better is that this movie was not even about a political campaign, but instead about a simple race for class president in high school. But the movie, in the dark comedy style of Payne, ends up being bone-chilling because it possesses a troubled realism that all the other wacky movies to make this list do not. Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon) will do anything to win. This includes running the reputation of a teacher, Matthew Broderick’s character, whose bitter revenge against her is doubly disturbing.
The convoluted revenge plots may be a bit exaggerated, but the human pettiness with which they are filled feel far too real, and the devastating consequences far too unforgivable. The movie’s greatest feature is that it reminds us that the personality required to run an election, to want to win so badly, is so deeply and fundamentally flawed as to by definition require the person be disqualified from running in the first place.
1. The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
But it is to a movie from a time gone by (but which nonetheless inspired a solid remake in 2004) that I must turn to for the top spot on today’s list.
At the height of Communist scares, The Manchurian Candidate, starring a solid Frank Sinatra and Angela Lansbury in undoubtedly the best role of her career, scared the living bejesus out of many Americans with its intricate but oddly believable conspiracy theory. It told the story of an army hero who had been captured and brainwashed in Communist China to become a killer agent, and how one of his army mates, himself also under a spell, wakes up to the reality as the plant is on his way to assassinate the presidential nominee in the midst of the election.
I know, I cheated again. The movie is not about the election itself per se, but it is, in my defense, of a candidate infiltrating the election. (Major spoilers ahead.) You see, the mole in the United States that is helping the Manchurian Candidate is none other than his mother, whose husband has been manipulated into the role of Vice-Presidential nominee. The evil Lansbury’s plan is that when her son kills the Presidential nominee, her husband will become President and cower under her oppressive thumb. Little does she know, of course, that Sinatra’s character is on a race against time to stop her. Perhaps I should not have spoken ill of House of Cards at the start.
The icy, evil performance by Lansbury suffices to make this movie one of the top five on this list. But it is its ability to mix noir elements with suspense, and simple drama with tragedy, while reminding us to gain control of our impassioned emotions in the midst of a political race that can be gripped by fear, that makes it the top choice today.
For all its over-the-top nature (and, as we discovered during this exercise, the over-the-top nature of all movies on this list!), this movie about the nastiness and evil of elections perhaps tells us something real. Perhaps there are no secret Communist takeover plots. But at the very least, these movies all together say, there sure is danger if the people allow themselves to be taken for a ride and not pay close attention to the candidates they support and ultimately, to the powerful influences that may be behind them.
Which of these movies gets your vote? Here, again, is Twitter.