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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.

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