The Front Runner

This depiction of what happened in 2 weeks on the campaign trail for 1988 Democratic Candidate Garry Hart has a lot of interesting segments, as it bounces around in perspective from Hart to his campaign team to various segments of the media. It’s a dive into several angles on a messy topic – how much should we expect from the people who represent us, and what rights do we have to look behind the curtain at their private lives? But it’s never quite able to come up with a final perspective that wraps everything up cleanly, and there’s never a single narrative thread that completely takes over – meaning this feels like a lot of first-drafts at a film about the Garry Hart scandal, rather than anything willing to be finalised. The segment on the treatment of Donna Rice, the civilian dragged into this without any protection, is intriguing, but it’s noticeable that it’s a section almost off to the side of the rest of the film – none of our main characters are prepared to engage with her in a humane way, which is what makes her treatment all the more notable. All the performances are fine as far as they go, but they never really are allowed to go deep enough for us to feel engaged. And while I’m a fan of Robert Altman’s kaleidoscopic methods, he has a gift for finding each of the single telling details about characters that give us everything we need to know – whereas here, director Jason Reitman seems reticent to allow us to know the characters deeply enough, meaning this ends up as an intellectually interesting but emotionally empty exercise that never quite cuts through the sound and fury to become something more.