Sometimes a dream movie project with all the right buzz, a super cast, and a hot director manages to fail anyway. Such was the case with "Primary Colors." Based on the 1996 novel written by Joe Klein that fictionalized the growing pains of Bill Clinton's run for the Democratic presidential nomination four years before, the movie stars John Travolta as Gov. Jack Stanton, a compulsive eater and sleeper-around, and his long-suffering, highly ambitious wife, Susan, played by Emma Thompson.
As seen through the eyes of idealistic campaign worker Henry Burton (Adrian Lester), Stanton falls from one boiling pot to another, from taped conversations with a bimbo who is clearly based on Gennifer Flowers to other scandals with less obvious a Clintonesque parallel, especially one involving the underage daughter of Stanton's favorite barbecue chef. For Stanton, winning the nomination is everything, and Burton finds himself struggling to keep his head up over the sludge.
While the performances range from pretty good (Lester, Thompson, Kathy Bates as a "dustbusting" lesbian working damage control on Stanton's character miscues) to fair (Travolta imitating Phil Hartman imitating Clinton, though giving good presence) to flat-out lost in the editing room (Maura Tierney and Billy Bob Thornton, solid as campaign officials until suddenly pulling Houdinis in the final third), the real problem is the script. Eileen May's adaptation struggles to represent every plot twist in the novel's Byzantine storyline, but it fails to capture the wonderfully jaded, wise, and amusing narrative voice of Klein's book, and squeezes in so much the end result is an overcooked soufflé of melodrama.
While "Primary Colors" the novel works as an over-the-top black farce with hints of real pathos, "Primary Colors" the film gives us a lot of agony and little of the fun. At nearly two-and-a-half hours, this makes for tough sledding.
May and director Mike Nichols were the team that did "The Birdcage," a fine, outrageous comedy, two years before. "Primary Colors" would seem a worthy candidate for the same light touch, but except for two sequences, one involving Rob Reiner as the soporific host of the radio show "Schmooze For Jews" and the other with Tony Shalhoub offering the goods on one of Stanton's opponents, you don't get that here. There's a lot of screaming instead, and talking, and more screaming, and more talking. Staffers blob out on hotel beds and whine about what's going wrong, crises are averted, then something else goes wrong. And everything is played soooo seriously.
The movie takes some liberties from the book, not good ones. An outrageously funny Al Sharpton character who rags on Burton for neglecting his black roots is omitted. Tierney's Daisy Green character is locked in a romance with Burton that is central to the novel (will ambition trump love?) but just presented and abandoned, along with Tierney, in the movie. Most important, the novel's ambiguous ending is spelled out with a scene that feels flat and self-congratulatory.
The truth is Stanton is hard to place as a good or bad guy, not because he's supposed to be Clinton, but because he's not Clinton. He's his own character, complex, decent, venal, idealistic, funny, greedy, selfish, and worth valuing for all that. Travolta gets the smoothness, but not the underneath part. Nor do Nichols and May, a great comedy team back in the 1960s who seem, for at least this one film, to have misplaced their senses of humor.
If I hadn't read the book, I might have liked this more. Maybe I'm docking the film more than I should that way. But given how condensed everything is, I probably wouldn't have understood the movie without reading the book. "Primary Colors" the book is full of life, but the film adaptation never breathes. If John Travolta really was Bill Clinton, he never would have made it out of New Hampshire.
As seen through the eyes of idealistic campaign worker Henry Burton (Adrian Lester), Stanton falls from one boiling pot to another, from taped conversations with a bimbo who is clearly based on Gennifer Flowers to other scandals with less obvious a Clintonesque parallel, especially one involving the underage daughter of Stanton's favorite barbecue chef. For Stanton, winning the nomination is everything, and Burton finds himself struggling to keep his head up over the sludge.
While the performances range from pretty good (Lester, Thompson, Kathy Bates as a "dustbusting" lesbian working damage control on Stanton's character miscues) to fair (Travolta imitating Phil Hartman imitating Clinton, though giving good presence) to flat-out lost in the editing room (Maura Tierney and Billy Bob Thornton, solid as campaign officials until suddenly pulling Houdinis in the final third), the real problem is the script. Eileen May's adaptation struggles to represent every plot twist in the novel's Byzantine storyline, but it fails to capture the wonderfully jaded, wise, and amusing narrative voice of Klein's book, and squeezes in so much the end result is an overcooked soufflé of melodrama.
While "Primary Colors" the novel works as an over-the-top black farce with hints of real pathos, "Primary Colors" the film gives us a lot of agony and little of the fun. At nearly two-and-a-half hours, this makes for tough sledding.
May and director Mike Nichols were the team that did "The Birdcage," a fine, outrageous comedy, two years before. "Primary Colors" would seem a worthy candidate for the same light touch, but except for two sequences, one involving Rob Reiner as the soporific host of the radio show "Schmooze For Jews" and the other with Tony Shalhoub offering the goods on one of Stanton's opponents, you don't get that here. There's a lot of screaming instead, and talking, and more screaming, and more talking. Staffers blob out on hotel beds and whine about what's going wrong, crises are averted, then something else goes wrong. And everything is played soooo seriously.
The movie takes some liberties from the book, not good ones. An outrageously funny Al Sharpton character who rags on Burton for neglecting his black roots is omitted. Tierney's Daisy Green character is locked in a romance with Burton that is central to the novel (will ambition trump love?) but just presented and abandoned, along with Tierney, in the movie. Most important, the novel's ambiguous ending is spelled out with a scene that feels flat and self-congratulatory.
The truth is Stanton is hard to place as a good or bad guy, not because he's supposed to be Clinton, but because he's not Clinton. He's his own character, complex, decent, venal, idealistic, funny, greedy, selfish, and worth valuing for all that. Travolta gets the smoothness, but not the underneath part. Nor do Nichols and May, a great comedy team back in the 1960s who seem, for at least this one film, to have misplaced their senses of humor.
If I hadn't read the book, I might have liked this more. Maybe I'm docking the film more than I should that way. But given how condensed everything is, I probably wouldn't have understood the movie without reading the book. "Primary Colors" the book is full of life, but the film adaptation never breathes. If John Travolta really was Bill Clinton, he never would have made it out of New Hampshire.